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An absolute photon upconversion efficiency of 8.2% is demonstrated using a liquid triplet fusion medium that behaves as solid on excitonic timescales. The findings may drive higher efficiencies in nanoscale solid-state photochemical upconversion devices.

Urinary levels of plastics-associated phthalates and bisphenols chemicals were associated with cardiometabolic risk biomarkers and can be lowered by reducing plastic use in food and personal-care products.

How is astrocyte heterogeneity controlled? How does it impact disease? Here, the authors show that STAT3 and NF-kB pathways define astrocyte subpopulations in wild type and APP/PS1dE9 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) model mice, with different morphology, transcriptional signature, functional features, and impact on AD-related alterations.

Salpeter-like slope can often describe the stellar initial mass function, but its universality and the link with core mass function are unknown. Here, the authors show high resolution observations of three massive clumps in 30Dor-10 region, which are consistent with Salpeter-like slope, supporting an evolving and multi-scale star formation scenario.

Desmoplastic small round cell tumor (DSRCT), a very rare and understudied sarcoma, presents serious challenges for both diagnosis and treatment. Here, the authors employ multi-omics profiling on 30 refractory DSRCT patients to improve the diagnosis and identify potentially actionable targets for individualized DSRCT treatment.

Grande de França et al. associated different dietary patterns with biological age acceleration estimated by epigenetic clocks and the inflammatory clock. Greater scores in the DASH diet and the“Plant-based” dietary pattern are associated with lower epigenetic age acceleration through reduced body fat, with a partial moderating role of sex and age.

The integration of carbon capture and electrochemical conversion is an emerging strategy to valorize CO₂. Here the authors demonstrate that altering CO₂–amine speciation in aprotic media enhances CO₂ uptake and suppresses hydrogen evolution, achieving promising Faradaic efficiency towards CO production, including with flue gas feedstocks.

Exposome analyses across 34 countries showed that social exposures were associated with faster functional brain aging and physical exposures with faster structural brain aging.

Preparation of phosphorescent materials from bio-based materials is desirable, but achieving the desired properties can be challenging. Here, the authors report the development of 3D printable woody materials by grafting carboxyl functional groups onto lignocellulose matrices.

T-prolymphocytic leukemia (T-PLL) is an aggressive T-cell malignancy, but 15–25% of cases are diagnosed at a primarily indolent stage. Here, the authors use single-cell RNA sequencing and whole genome sequencing to study the molecular changes underlying the indolent-to-active evolution of T-PLL, finding patient-specific and common mechanisms of disease progression.

Analyses of snRNA genes in a French cohort of people with rare disorders, with validation through international collaboration, identify monoallelic and biallelic variants in RNU2-2 as frequent causes of neurodevelopmental disorders with epilepsy.

The authors report acoustic microrobots with engineered cilia that could deform like bend, rotate, and change shape on demand. They use machine learning to accelerate and optimize designs for efficient actuation and future biomedical uses.

Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, is designed to be an expert-level closed-ended academic benchmark with broad subject coverage.

Emerging evidence underscores biophysical characteristics of cancer cells as key modulators of cancer metastasis. Here, the authors reported a single-cell mechanophenotyping chip that screens deformable CTCs to reveal the hematogenous metastatic potential of bacteria-infected breast cancer.

Up-recycling waste wood as a source for producing materials is crucial for sustainability. Here, the authors discover that in situ thermal curing of melamine formaldehyde resin with natural wood enhanced its room temperature phosphorescence performance.

This multidisciplinary response to investigate the large outbreak of unknown febrile illness in the Panzi Health Zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in late 2024 suggests that the outbreak was largely associated with malarial cases and concurrent viral respiratory infections.

In this randomized phase 3 trial, patients with treatment-naive stage III–IV nonsmall cell lung cancer who received sintilimab or pembrolizumab in combination with chemotherapy early in the day (before 15:00 h) experienced longer progression-free survival compared with those receiving late time-of-day infusions.

Using nitrogen isotopes from ancient and modern fish otoliths and corals, the study shows Caribbean reef food webs are now 60–70% shorter and functionally less diverse, indicating human-driven trophic simplification and increased risk of collapse.

As Nature Aging celebrates its fifth anniversary, the journal asks some of the researchers who contributed to the journal early on to reflect on the past and the future of aging and age-related disease research, the impact of the field on human health now and in the future, and what challenges need to be addressed to ensure sustained progress.

The study introduces polyethyleneimine as an additive in a thermocell, enhancing thermopower from 1.4 to 7.76 mV/K. It achieves long-term stability and scalability by enabling thermosensitive adsorption-desorption, selective reactions, and Manning condensation, converting low-grade heat to electricity efficiently.

The early genetic evolution of uveal melanoma (UM) remains poorly understood. Here, the authors perform genetic profiling of 1140 primary UMs, including 131 small early-stage tumours, finding that most genetic driver aberrations have occurred by the time small tumours are biopsied; in addition, the15-gene expression profile discriminant score can predict the transition from low- to high-risk tumours.

Hydrogels with room temperature phosphorescence have potential in a number of applications, but mechanical properties can limit the potential. Here, the authors report a wood-based hydrogel with room temperature phosphorescence, by polymerization of acrylamide with delignified wood.

Chen et al. show that PEX39 cooperates with PEX7 in the peroxisomal import of proteins containing a PTS2 site and uncover an (R/K)PWE motif in PEX39 and PEX13 that binds to PEX7 and facilitates the import of PTS2-containing proteins.

Understanding the organism-wide molecular effects of spaceflight becomes increasingly critical as space exploration accelerates. Here, the authors show that miRNAs mediate microgravity-induced adaptations via extracellular matrix, DNA damage and developmental pathways, as shown by small RNA profiling in 13 organs of mice during and after spaceflight.

MedHELM, an extensible evaluation framework including a new taxonomy for classifying medical tasks and a benchmark of many datasets across these categories, enables the evaluation of large language models on real-world clinical tasks.

The interplay between dark and bright excitons has a significant impact on the optical properties of semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides. Here, the authors perform computational and experimental studies which unveil the microscopic origin of the excitonic coherence lifetime in WS₂ and MoSe₂.

Diagnosis of invasive pulmonary nodules and prediction of tumor invasiveness in lung cancer patients remains challenging. Here, mass cytometry analysis of peripheral blood samples from 1032 patients and a machine learning approach, the SMART platform, allow differential diagnosis and surgical management of small pulmonary nodules.

A CRISPR screen reveals that loss of structural components of the SAGA complex derails hematopoiesis by decoupling epigenetic control. This halts stem cell maturation, triggers a pathogenic interferon program and boosts human MDS-L cell growth.

Newly developed mouse models that enable cell-specific analyses of proteostasis dynamics across the lifespan of the mice reveal key aspects of neuronal proteostasis with ageing.

High-order correlated states in atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides may be facilitated by long-lived optically dark excitons. Here, the authors report experimentally the emergence of neutral and charged biexciton species at low light intensities in encapsulated WSe₂ monolayers.

It is elusive to manufacture room temperature phosphorescent (RTP) materials through effective and ambient processing approaches. Here the authors report the production of photocured RTP materials using lignosulfonate to act as RTP chromophore and photoinitiator, achieving easy preparation, low cost and good performance.

This study shows that strain-stabilized interfacial polarization in metallic RuO₂/TiO₂ heterostructures modulates the work function by over 1 eV and the metallicity, establishing a new route to control the electronic properties of functional metals.

The clinical adaptation of CRISPR assays is constrained by complexity and the absence of quality control. Here, authors report a thermally regulated asynchronous CRISPR-enhanced assay enabling direct, highly sensitive one-step detection of monkeypox virus and a human gene in clinical samples.

The purification of ethylene is an industrially relevant process. Here, the authors report the one-step separation of ethylene from quaternary gas mixtures of hydrocarbons and CO₂ using a single metal–organic framework-based physisorbent.

African trypanosomes use antigenic variation to escape host antibodies. Here, the authors show that genomic compartments with silent variant genes are spatially segregated from transcribed chromatin and identify the silencing machinery.

An important source of loss in solar cells is the recombination of the photogenerated charge carriers before they are extracted from the device. Chang et al. now show that such recombination can be reduced in organic solar cells by increasing the separation between donors and acceptors.

This study reports that de novo germline missense variants in SF3B1, distinct from the somatic variants frequently observed in cancer, cause a neurodevelopmental disorder and disrupt global RNA splicing.

A detailed understanding of the response of graphene resonators to changes in mass and temperature could lead to the development of ultrasensitive mass detectors and other nanoelectromechanical systems.

Characterizing molecular aging features is crucial for understanding systemic and local factors contributing to the aging process. Here Costa, Chen et al. performed RNA sequencing on 13 tissues across six ages in male and female African turquoise killifish. This sex-balanced killifish aging atlas provides a comprehensive resource for studying aging dynamics across tissues in the killifish—a powerful, short-lived vertebrate model of aging.

Fatigue-resistant functional bioadhesion is desired in diverse applications ranging from wound management to wearable devices but remains elusive. Here, the authors report the design, deployment, and mechanism of nanowhisker glues for fatigue-resistant functional bioadhesion.

Screening of DNA-encoded chemical libraries against prostatic acid phosphatase yielded OncoACP3, a modular small organic ligand with picomolar binding affinity that enabled targeted payload delivery to prostate cancer.

Uterine perivascular cells were identified as progenitors for endometrial re-epithelialization via mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition, whereby cellular quiescence and activation were mediated via Notch signaling and estrogen, respectively.

In the worm, netrin and the TGFβ-related molecule UNC-129 form opposing dorsoventral gradients. Motor axons are repelled by netrin and attracted to UNC-129, but no TGFβ receptors appear to be involved in the attraction. This study shows that UNC-129 enhances repulsive signaling from the netrin receptor complex UNC-5/UNC-40, via a direct interaction with UNC-5.

Some basaltic melts become first superheated upon their ascent towards the Earth’s surface and then saturated in chromite alone after cooling in shallow chambers. Here the authors show that large volumes of these chromite-only-saturated melts are responsible for monomineralic layers of massive chromitites in layered intrusions.

Convenient and sustainable photoactivated room temperature phosphorescent (RTP) materials exhibit great potential in a wide ranging of applications but are difficult to obtain. Here the authors develop a photoactivated RTP materials by covalently attaching lignin to polylactic acid.

Atomically thin layers of transition metal dichalcogenides are shown to exhibit a disappearance of strong excitonic absorption along with population inversion at the direct gap over a spectral range of hundreds of meV after pulsed photoexcitation.