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Blue light promotes DNA repair in plants via cryptochrome signalling. Here the authors report that this occurs via suppression of COP1 mediated degradation of the repair factor ADA2b and propose that together photoreceptors and COP1 balance genome stability with growth under fluctuating light.

Global potential forestation currently increases runoff in tropical regions but reduces it in boreal regions, such latitudinal divergence is driven mainly by forest-atmosphere feedbacks rather than direct effects of forest expansion.

Nav1.7 is a threshold current generator. Here, authors show that Thr1398 underlies the low voltage dependence of hNav1.7, determines its function as a threshold channel. This low-voltage dependence may be exploited to develop Nav1.7 selective inhibitors for pain therapy.

A pigeon-eye-inspired multimodal high-resolution tactile sensor, combined with a tactile language model, allows robots to achieve human-like tactile perception and understanding of their environment.

A complete genome assembly of a crab-eating macaque, revealing 46% fewer segmental duplications and 3.83 times longer centromeres than those of humans, is presented, enhancing understanding of lineage-specific phenotypes, adaptation and primate evolution.

In Eastern Asia, vegetation greening, especially in perennial drylands, has increasingly reduced dust emissions since the early 2000s, with effects amplified over long timescales, underscoring the mitigating capacity of land-surface change for multi-decadal dust trends.

Shifts in phenology can significantly impact organism fitness, ecosystem function, and the provision of ecosystem goods and services. Through a global meta-analysis, this study shows how shifts in the timing of leaf-out and first flowering due to warming and precipitation changes depend on plant functional group and climate region.

The extreme hot and dry conditions of 2023 reduced soil respiration and enhanced net forest carbon sequestration in Canada, offsetting wildfire emissions, according to satellite-based and in situ observations of CO₂ fluxes.

The red fluorescent protein mScarlet3-H is bright, photostable and very robust to high temperature, chaotropic conditions and oxidative environments. mScarlet3-H works well in correlative light and electron microscopy, tissue clearing and time-lapse super-resolution microscopy.

Trees outside forests, particularly in croplands, grasslands, and urban areas, accounted for 20.8–32.9% of China’s above-ground carbon in 2019, occupying 3.6–5.7 Pg C, based on a two-step machine learning approach integrating diverse remote sensing data.

The authors reveal the structure and gating mechanisms of BRTNaC1, a myriapod ion channel sensitive to heat and acidity. They show that a proton triggers a ‘twist the wrist’ motion, heat induces broad structural changes and testosterone inhibits channel activation.

The venom of the Chinese red-headed centipede causes excruciating pain. Here, Yanget al. identify a novel toxin protein from the centipede venom and find that it can activate the nociceptive TRPV1 ion channel by binding to the channel’s outer pore to potentiate the heat activation machinery.

Direct stereoselective amination of tertiary C–H bonds without the assistance of directing groups is a challenging task in synthetic organic chemistry. Now a nitrene transferase is engineered to aminate tertiary C–H bonds with high enantioselectivity, providing direct access to valuable chiral α-tertiary primary amines.

Complete sequences of chromosomes telomere-to-telomere from chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan and siamang provide a comprehensive and valuable resource for future evolutionary comparisons.

By inducing a transformation in a manganese-rich cation-disordered rocksalt, partially ordered spinels with nanomosaic domains of 3–7 nm in size can be obtained, which exhibit high energy density and rate capability at an average particle size of 3–5 µm.

pH sensation is critical for survival of vertebrates. Here, authors found six vertebrate OTOP1 channels that were highly conserved and directly activated by extracellular alkali. Key mutations of OTOP1 reduced alkali affinity without affecting acid activation.

The authors present a 3.5-million-year-long pollen record from the Zoige Basin of the eastern Tibetan Plateau, 3,442 m above sea level. The ~5,000 pollen assemblages retrieved from the core reveal many ecosystem transitions during this time and, when correlated with climatic curves, indicate what effects future warming may have on regional vegetation.

Current wrinkling processes for pattern formation cannot be easily controlled, resulting in deformation or detachment of patterns from substrates. Here, Zhong et al. report a wrinkling strategy for creating patterned structures with long-range order and resistant to force relaxation.

The upper paleo-range limit of trees dictates the endemic habitat of alpine trees. Here, the authors combine satellite, dendrochronological, fossil pollen, and paleoclimate data to create a model that reconstructs the upper range limit of trees through the last 22 thousand years on the Tibetan Plateau.

Climate oscillations, such as El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), play a key role in global and regional crop yield variations. The authors analysed crop yield data in China from 1980 to 2017 and found that ENSO affects yield not only through local climate variability but also by driving migratory crop pest outbreaks, highlighting an overlooked pathway by which ENSO drives yield loss.

Menthol in mints elicits a coolness sensation by selective activation of TRPM8 ion channel. Here authors dock menthol to TRPM8 and systematically validate their menthol binding models with thermodynamic mutant cycle analysis in functional tests, and shed light on TRPM8 activation by menthol at the atomic level.

Spring leaf unfolding has been occurring earlier in the year because of rising temperatures; however, long-term evidence in the field from 7 European tree species studied in 1,245 sites shows that this early unfolding effect is being reduced in recent years, possibly because the reducing chilling and/or insolation render trees less responsive to warming.

Hepatic expression of constitutively active glucagon receptor may have contributed to the glucose and lipid metabolism and the high metabolic rates that enabled the evolution of flight in birds.

The heat-sensitive ion channel TRPV1 is essential to temperature sensing in mammals and other animals. Here the authors find that the platypus form of TRPV1 does not desensitize, identify the mechanism underlying this property, and show that knock-in of this form of the receptor in mice leads to deficits in heat sensitivity.

A synthesis of global change experiments that manipulated temperature, precipitation, carbon dioxide or nitrogen identifies a need to consider site-specific factors and interactions in Earth system models.

Pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins bind RNA and are involved in the regulation of RNA metabolism in eukaryotes. Here, the authors examine the capability of these proteins as modules for gene manipulation using structural biology methods.

The impact of land-use and cover-change (LUCC) on ecosystem carbon stock in China is poorly known due to large biases in existing databases. Here the authors develop a new LUCC database with corrected false signals and reveal that forest expansion is the dominant driver of China’s recent carbon sink.

Food demand is increasing, while climate change is impacting the magnitude and stability of crop yields. High-quality soils are able to buffer the negative impacts of climate change and lead to smaller yield reduction and higher yield stability, indicating a potential adaptation strategy.

China’s large-scale tree planting could sequester 5.9 ± 0.5 PgC by planting 44.7 billion trees. Tree densification in existing forests may be a more cost-effective strategy than afforestation.

Using data from long-term nationwide observations and multi-level rainfall manipulative experiments, this study reveals that rice yield reductions due to extreme rainfall in China were comparable to those induced by extreme heat over the past two decades. Further projections highlight the increasing risk of rice yield reductions induced by extreme rainfall by the end of this century.

Livestock grazing may drive grassland degradation. Here, the authors use process-based modelling validated with empirical data to define a stocking rate threshold across grassland on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, identify vulnerable areas and predict threshold shifts under future climate scenarios.

Fast and simultaneous identification of multiple viable pathogens on food is critical to public health. By integrating paper chromogenic arrays (PCAs) and machine learning, a system was developed to automatically recognize PCA patterns on multiplexed viable pathogens with strain-level specificity.

Satellite records combined with global ecosystem models show a persistent and widespread greening over 25–50% of the global vegetated area; less than 4% of the globe is browning. CO₂ fertilization explains 70% of the observed greening trend.

Arid regions are projected to expand in the future. An ensemble of climate model simulations reveals that limiting anthropogenic warming to 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C can markedly reduce the area undergoing, and thus the population exposed to, aridification.

The ratio of plant transpiration to total terrestrial evapotranspiration (T/ET) captures the role of vegetation in surface–atmosphere interactions. An emergent constraint approach strongly increases existing model T/ET estimates with implications for river flows.

Deforestation causes elevation-dependent warming over tropical mountain regions, according to high-resolution climate simulations.

Resequencing and genome-wide association analysis of 683 common bean accessions across different latitudes identifies 505 loci associated with yield components, of which seed size, flowering and harvest maturity traits are stable across environments.

A high-resolution map of the realized range limit of high-elevation trees across the Himalayas shows that trees are absent from the thermal treeline, determined by growing-season temperature, across the western and central Himalayas, as a result of human disturbance and/or premonsoon drought.

There are big uncertainties in the contribution of irrigation to crop yields. Here, the authors use Bayesian model averaging to combine statistical and process-based models and quantify the contribution of irrigation for wheat and maize yields, finding that irrigation alone cannot close yield gaps for a large fraction of global rainfed agriculture.

Emerging evidence suggests that exit from pluripotency is a regulated, rather than passive process. Here the authors identify a requirement for SS18-mediated Brg/Brahma-associated factors (BAF) chromatin remodeling complex assembly during exit from pluripotency, and that SS18 promotes BAF assembly through liquidliquid phase separation.

The authors have developed a new method, metagenome-wide association study (MGWAS), to compare the combined genetic content of the faecal microbiota of healthy people versus patients with type 2 diabetes; they identify multiple microbial species and metabolic pathways that are associated with either cohort and show that some of these may be used as biomarkers.

The greater wax moth (GWM) is a major bee pest. Here, the authors show how a pest control method that combines a strain of Bacillus thuringiensis and a lure-based entrapment can help to control GWM using lab experiments and field beehives.

Difficulties in separating tribo and piezoelectric hybrid signals can lead to an overestimated contribution of the latter. Here, authors propose a method to separate these hybrid signals in the time domain, precisely extracting piezoelectric charge transfer for performance evaluation.

Wind speeds have reduced globally over land since the 1980s. In situ data show that this reversed around 2010, with natural ocean–atmosphere variability thought to drive the wind speed changes, as well as a 17% increase in potential wind energy for 2010–2017 and a boosted wind power capacity factor.

Climate change may lead to changes in elevational patterns of vegetation activitities. Here, the authors analyze global remotely sensing data collected during 1982–2015 to investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics of the elevational gradient in vegetation activities.