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The Arabian Sea and eastern tropical Pacific oxygen minimum zones were better oxygenated during the warm Miocene, but with regional complexities, according to analysis of trace elements and nitrogen isotopes in planktonic foraminifera.

This Perspective highlights advances in bioluminescence resonance energy transfer technologies for measuring intracellular drug–target engagement, expanding their use to analyze kinetics, permeability and complex mechanisms in chemical biology.

Abnormal PR interval duration is associated with risk for atrial fibrillation and heart block. Here, van Setten et al. identify 44 PR interval loci in a genome-wide association study of over 92,000 individuals and find genetic overlap with QRS duration, heart rate and atrial fibrillation.

Most eukaryotes maintain telomeres using a specialized reverse transcriptase. Here the authors report that Thc1 (Telomerase Holoenzyme Component 1) and Bmc1 (Bin3/MePCE 1) form a complex with Pof8, a constitutive member of telomerase in fission yeast.

In this study, the distinct impacts of deforestation and global climate change on the Brazilian Amazon are quantified for the period 1985-2020. Deforestation amplifies the temperature increase and dominates the decrease in rainfall in the dry season.

The high-order harmonics of short laser pulses created in a nonlinear medium are a useful source of extreme-ultraviolet and soft-X-ray radiation. A newly discovered phenomenon that amplifies this emission even further could improve the efficiency of short-wavelength light sources.

The pathophysiology of epilepsy is unclear. Here, the authors present single-nuclei transcriptomic profiling of human temporal lobe epilepsy from patients. They identified epilepsy-associated neuronal subtypes, and a panel of dysregulated genes, predicting neuronal circuits contributing to epilepsy.

Arrays of ordered metal atoms on bulk insulating materials are promising for future applications, such as optoelectronics and data storage. Here, the authors demonstrate a strategy to create an ordered metal array based on tailored anchoring and hard-sphere repulsion of metal-complexing molecules.

In a large-scale analysis of ambulatory electrocardiographic recordings, a deep learning algorithm had a substantially higher sensitivity for the detection of critical arrhythmias as compared to technicians, opening a path toward artificial intelligence-assisted direct-to-physician reporting of ambulatory electrocardiography results.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

The SUMO E3 ligase ZNF451 is a representative member of a new class of SUMO enzymes that execute catalysis via tandem SUMO-interaction motifs, thus allowing efficient SUMO-chain formation.

The complete DNA sequence of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosome IV has been determined. Apart from chromosome XII, which contains the 1–2 Mb rDNA cluster, chromosome IV is the longest S. cerevisiae chromosome. It was split into three parts, which were sequenced by a consortium from the European Community, the Sanger Centre, and groups from St Louis and Stanford in the United States. The sequence of 1,531,974 base pairs contains 796 predicted or known genes, 318 (39.9%) of which have been previously identified. Of the 478 new genes, 225 (28.3%) are homologous to previously identified genes and 253 (32%) have unknown functions or correspond to spurious open reading frames (ORFs). On average there is one gene approximately every two kilobases. Superimposed on alternating regional variations in G+C composition, there is a large central domain with a lower G+C content that contains all the yeast transposon (Ty) elements and most of the tRNA genes. Chromosome IV shares with chromosomes II, V, XII, XIII and XV some long clustered duplications which partly explain its origin.

Video microscopy is key in studying cell migration, but accomplishing this in a high-throughput manner is still challenging. Here, the authors present an array microscope that can track the movements of thousands of individual cells simultaneously, and that can be used for drug screening studies.

Anna Köttgen and colleagues report genome-wide association studies for serum urate in over 140,000 individuals from the Global Urate Genetics Consortium (GUGC). They identify 18 loci newly associated with serum urate concentrations and confirm 10 known loci, characterize their associations with gout and include a network analysis suggesting a role for inhibins-activins pathways in regulating urate homeostasis.

Krauhausen et al. developed a robotic system that learned how to avoid dangerous objects. This behavioural conditioning was demonstrated by forming multimodal associative connections of various sensors, using an integrated organic neuromorphic circuit.

Certain peptides can boost viral infectivity. However, the requirements for their activity remain unclear. Here, the authors demonstrate that peptides are efficient viral enhancers if they form hydrophobic β-sheet-rich, positively charged μm-sized aggregates.

Analyses of tumor and bone marrow tissue from patients with glioblastoma demonstrate the presence of extracerebral niches that contained tumor-reactive and memory T cell subsets, including early stem-like phenotypes and stages, indicating antitumor CD8⁺ T cell differentiation in cranial bone marrow.

Investigating the inner structure of baryons is important to further our understanding of the strong interaction. Here, the BESIII Collaboration extracts the absolute value of the ratio of the electric to magnetic form factors and its relative phase for e + e − → J/ψ → ΛΣ decays, enhancing the signal thanks to the vacuum polarisation effect at the J/ψ peak.

The success of extinction learning is not predictive of long-term retrieval of an extinction memory. Using fMRI to study consolidation of fear extinction in human subjects, the authors show that reactivation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex during memory retrieval predicts extinction memory retrieval, and that increasing dopaminergic signaling increases the number of these activations.

Exotic spin-dependent force are among the possible extensions of the Standard Model that can be probed by precision measurements. Here, the authors use a spin-exchange-relaxation free (SERF) K-Rb-21Ne comagnetometer to improve limits on spin- and velocity dependent forces.

BNT162b1 and BNT162b2 are two candidate mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that elicit high virus-entry inhibition titres in mice, elicit high virus-neutralizing titres in rhesus macaques and protect macaques from SARS-CoV-2 challenge.

Different functional variants in ADH1B (and elsewhere) in Europeans and Africans strongly affect risk for alcohol dependence. Dependence only partly genetically correlates with consumption, with strong correlations to other psychiatric disorders.

Primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) is highly heritable, yet not well understood from a genetic perspective. Here, the authors perform a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in 34,179 POAG cases, identifying 44 previously unreported risk loci and mapping effects across multiple ethnicities.

Forest carbon source and sink processes may have contrasting climatic sensitivities. This analysis on 177 coniferous forest sites shows that carbon fluxes and wood formation are coupled but not fully synchronous at intra-annual scales, with peaks in cambial activity preceding those in photosynthesis and respiration.

Vision-language artificial intelligence models (VLMs) can be employed to recognize lesions in cancer images. Here, the authors show that VLMs can be misled by prompt injection attacks, producing harmful output and leading to incorrect diagnoses.

Analysis of shallow-water marine carbonate samples from 101 stratigraphic units allows construction of a record of lithium isotopes from the past 3 billion years, tracking the evolution of the global carbon and silicon cycles.

Caroline Fox and colleagues report results of a large genome-wide association meta-analysis and replication study for indices of renal function. Their work identifies 13 new loci associated with renal function and 7 loci associated with creatinine production and secretion.

Analyses of 475 ancient horse genomes show modern horses emerged around 2200 bce, coinciding with sudden expansion across Eurasia, refuting the narrative of large horse herds accompanying earlier migrations of steppe peoples across Europe.

The loading of the replicative helicase is vital for replication fork assembly. Here the authors identify Mcm4 as the key ATPase in this process and show that helicase ring closure around DNA promotes Mcm4 ATPase dependent Cdt1 release, while defective ring closure leads to complex disassembly.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports the observation of the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair. This process is related to vector-boson scattering and allows the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking to be probed.

Correct loading of the MCM2-7 helicase is crucial for DNA replication and cell cycle progression. Here, the authors used high-resolution genomics to demonstrate how ORC is displaced from origins, which serves as a mechanism for distributive MCM loading onto DNA.

A single electromagnetically trapped proton is sympathetically cooled to below ambient temperature by coupling it through a superconducting LC circuit to a laser-cooled cloud of Be⁺ ions stored in a spatially separated trap.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports a measurement of the ratio of the decay rates of W bosons to τ leptons and muons, in agreement with universal lepton couplings as postulated in the standard model of particle physics.

Ji et al. identify an idiopathic generalised epilepsy network that links heterogeneously distributed brain abnormalities to a common brain network and deep brain stimulation sites which reduce generalised seizures.

Earth’s mantle has cooled since the Archaean. Geochemical identification of anomalously hot lavas formed above the Galapagos Plume 89 million years ago, however, implies that a hot mantle reservoir may have persisted for billions of years.

The Middle East is known to emit large amounts of non-methane hydrocarbon pollutants to the atmosphere, but the sources are poorly characterized. Here the authors discover a new source—deep water in the Red Sea—and calculate that its emissions exceed rates of several high gas-production countries.

A critical milestone for the advancement of nanoscale organic circuitry is the fabrication of well-defined conjugated polymers on non-metal substrates. Here, the authors demonstrate extended polycyclic aromatic chains from repetitive cycloadditions which form not only on metals, but also on boron nitride layers and in the solid state.

The results obtained by seventy different teams analysing the same functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset show substantial variation, highlighting the influence of analytical choices and the importance of sharing workflows publicly and performing multiple analyses.