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Perseveration – repeating one choice when others would generate larger rewards – is a common behavior, but neither its purpose nor neuronal mechanisms are understood. Here the authors demonstrate a neural correlate and causal role of dorsal prefrontal cortex, specifically anterior supplementary motor cortex, in perseveration in mice performing a dynamic reward learning task.

The CMS experiment at CERN reports one of the highest-precision measurements of the W boson mass, finding it in line with standard model predictions and at odds with recent anomalous measurements.

New predictions for how temporal stability and resilience depend on their resistance and recovery components are explored.

Global Burden of Disease analysis found that in 2023, suboptimal diet was estimated to be responsible for 4 million deaths and 97 million morbidity burdens from ischemic heart disease.

LHAASO has detected γ-ray emission with a spectrum extending to 2 PeV from the pulsar wind nebula (PWN) powered by PSR J1849-0001, indicating an extreme particle acceleration efficiency and challenging the current particle acceleration theories.

Multi-ancestry and ancestry-stratified genome-wide analyses identify genetic variants associated with refractive error and enable construction of an enhanced polygenic predictor incorporating functional annotations.

This study develops a platform that enables simultaneous, multiplexed tracing of 30 nitrogen isotope-labelled metabolites, uncovering differences in pyrimidine synthesis pathway choice between primitive and differentiated cells.

Three-body low-energy s-wave states play an important role in few-body physics and associated universal phenomena, yet their experimental observation in nuclear system has been elusive. Here, the authors identify the three-body s-wave properties in neutron-rich ¹⁰He nuclei with improved statistics and sensitivities.

Osteoarthritis is driven by epigenetic dysregulation, yet targeted therapies remain elusive. Here, the authors develop a cartilage-targeting hydrogel delivering BRD4-degrading PROTACs to suppress the BRD4- Nav1.7 axis and alleviate osteoarthritis.

A device architecture comprising silicon-based mobile qubits and the shuttling of two electron spins together demonstrates two-qubit gate fidelity of about 99% as well as quantum state teleportation between qubits separated by 320 nm.

The OCTCube models integrate optical coherence tomography and other imaging modalities to achieve state-of-the-art performance in predicting retinal diseases with strong generalizability across cohorts, devices and modalities.

Identifying and classifying chiral phonons has been challenging, limiting their use in quantum and thermal technologies. Now, a symmetry-based framework and database describe phonon chirality across space groups and reveal promising material candidates.

Risk profiling based on how BMI interacts with cardiovascular markers was useful in the general population. In type 1 diabetes— where cardiovascular risk is already high— these profiles are notably valuable for tailored approaches as they reveal how high glucose may hide other risk factors

Inborn errors of cell death (IECD) with autoinflammatory manifestations could be induced by excessive T cell death. Here the authors characterize IECD patients with autoinflammatory manifestations who possess overactive RIPK1 variants which promote T cell death, secretion of TNF and IFN-γ along with activation of monocytes and macrophages which promotes further autoinflammation.

This study identifies distinct transposable element subfamilies as genetic determinants of stemness properties in normal and leukemic stem populations with clinical implications for patients with acute myeloid leukemia.

Radiocarbon analyses show that dryland soils store organic carbon with a mean age of ~2100 years and release carbon averaging ~520 years old, suggesting that long-stored carbon in drylands is vulnerable to environmental change.

Self-assembled hole-selective molecules can enable high performance in perovskite solar cells, but controlling the hole extraction efficiency is challenging. Tianyu Li et al. address this by designing molecules that adopt a quasi-random orientation on the substrate.

When 100 social and behavioural science claims were examined, 34% of reanalyses closely matched the original results, with 74% reaching the same conclusion, revealing limited robustness of single-path analyses and the need to address analytical uncertainty.

Midbrain dopamine neurons play a key role in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The authors report that altered dopaminergic gene expression in schizophrenia preferentially affects sites with complex chromosomal organization linked to genetic risk.

The Human Development Multiomic Atlas catalogues single-cell accessibility and gene expression data from human fetal cells across 12 organs, enabling the inference of syntactic rules for motifs that govern cell-type-specific transcription factor binding and chromatin accessibility during human development.

Triplet excitons in OPVs can redissociate via the charge-transfer state into free carriers, reducing losses and improving efficiency, enabled by molecular design controlling singlet–triplet energetics through exciton delocalization.

Modular RNA nanostar motifs spontaneously assemble into programmable synthetic condensates in the nucleus and cytoplasm, with RNA design controlling localization, sequence-specific target recruitment and orthogonal assembly.

Reti-Pioneer, a retinal imaging artificial intelligence framework, identified diverse systemic diseases and demonstrated feasibility in a primary care silent trial, offering a pathway toward scalable clinical evaluation.

Although central nervous system’s function depends on blood flow patterns, the mechanism behind their formation is unknown. Here the authors show that specialized pericytes connected by tunneling nanotubes control flux patterns in the mouse retina.

The authors from the ALICE collaboration identify multiple species of mesons and baryons and measure the anisotropic flow with non-flow removal techniques in pp and p-Pb collisions at the LHC, identifying the hallmark of quark flow associated with an expanding quark-gluon plasma.

This study uses the inception loop framework to map neuronal invariances in mouse V1, revealing a bipartite receptive-field organization linked to segmentation and a synaptic-level hierarchy of increasing invariance supported by the MICrONS dataset.

Androgen activity in the male embryonic hindbrain prolongs hindbrain differentiation in male individuals and drives sex differences in the incidence and prognosis of posterior fossa type A (PFA) ependymoma, an aggressive childhood brain tumour.

The study identifies novel genetic variants linked to core cerebrospinal fluid Alzheimer’s Disease biomarkers using a genome-wide analysis, showing how endophenotypes can identify genes and disease mechanisms not captured by case-control studies.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

Identifying jets originating from heavy quarks plays a fundamental role in hadronic collider experiments. In this work, the ATLAS Collaboration describes and tests a transformer-based neural network architecture for jet flavour tagging based on low-level input and physics-inspired constraints.

The authors resolve 63 structurally diverse haplotype structures for the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome region. Deletion risk differs depending on structure; individuals of African ancestry are enriched for inverted repeats that predispose to inversion.

James Webb Space Telescope observations show powerful high-redshift quasar outflows, supporting quasar feedback as a key mechanism driving rapid star-formation quenching in early massive galaxies.

Antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 continue to evolve 6 to 12 months after infection in patients who have recovered from COVID-19, increasing in potency and breadth with time.

The CMS Collaboration reports the measurement of the spin, parity, and charge conjugation properties of all-charm tetraquarks, exotic fleeting particles formed in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

Here, the authors show that two genes encoding KATANIN p60 in maize promote growth and fertility via proper cell expansion and division. Aberrant microtubule organization in mutants alters cell shape, delays G1, and disrupts preprophase band formation and nuclear positioning.

Bioactivity-guided isolation of specialized metabolites is an iterative process. Here, the authors demonstrate a native metabolomics approach that allows for fast screening of complex metabolite extracts against a protein of interest and simultaneous structure annotation.

Wide-field quantum sensing shows μm-scale inhomogeneous superconductivity in high-pressure La₃Ni₂O₇, linking local diamagnetic response to stress and stoichiometry and clarifying mechanisms that suppress or enhance superconductivity.

Robustness checks and reproduction of analyses with existing and updated data based on 110 articles in economics and political science journals with data and code-sharing requirements found high levels of robustness and reproducibility and determined that robustness was not dependent on author characteristics or data availability.

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrates evidence of spin correlations in \(\Lambda \bar{\Lambda }\) hyperon pairs inherited from virtual spin-correlated strange quark–antiquark pairs during QCD confinement.

This study shows that rising incomes and hotter climates are driving a boom in air conditioning use, which adds to global warming. This highlights the need for clean, efficient and equitable cooling solutions.

Owing to electron localization, two-dimensional materials are not expected to be metallic at low temperatures, but a field-induced quantum metal phase emerges in NbSe₂, whose behaviour is consistent with the Bose-metal model.

Soil microbes recycle nutrients, but their global nutrient use efficiency is poorly understood. This study finds microbial nitrogen-use efficiency is nearly twice phosphorus-use efficiency, driven by soil carbon content, and is lowest in tundra and boreal forests.

It remains unclear why some BRCA-deficient high-grade serous carcinomas (HGSC) do not respond to platinum-based therapy. Here, multi-omic analysis of BRCA1- and BRCA2-deficient HGSC attributes co-occurring mutations, DNA repair deficiency and tumor microenvironment features to short survival in these patients.

The morphology of hole-selective contacts is key to the stability of perovskite solar cells. Feng et al. use self-assembled molecules with extended conjugation and hydroxyl groups to form dense, amorphous films that suppress degradation induced by ion migration.

Using multislice electron ptychography to directly measure the atomic-scale structural evolution of the nickelate La₃Ni₂O₇ under a range of biaxial strains, a theoretical framework is constructed for characterizing the impact of specific structural motifs for stabilizing superconductivity.

The quark structure of the f₀(980) hadron is still unknown after 50 years of its discovery. Here, the CMS Collaboration reports a measurement of the elliptic flow of the f₀(980) state in proton-lead collisions at a nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy of 8.16 TeV, providing strong evidence that the state is an ordinary meson.

This study uses two large fundus cohorts to show that retinal foundation models generalize well across populations but exhibit age-related fairness gaps. It highlights how pre-training data composition shapes model generalisability and fairness.