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Estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study reveal declines in chronic respiratory disease mortality between 1990 and 2023—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic—but the burdens on people affected remain substantial.

Microplastics (MPs) represent an environmental hazard which must be resolved by efficient, cheap, and sustainable remediation technology. Here the authors use an engineered algae to capture MPs and treat wastewater, the captured algae-plastic mix is upcycled into a tougher bioplastic composite.

Powering single organic electrochemical transistor (OECT) device is challenging as power reductions can cause unstable device outputs. Wu et al. report a wearable, self-powered biosensor with a dual-OECT amplifier powered by an organic solar cell for monitoring physiological signals under varying light conditions.

The authors report superconducting topological surface states (TSS) on MBE-grown Fe(Te,Se) films by high-resolution laser-ARPES. Near the FeTe limit, the surface state disappears due to an electron-correlation-driven topological transition associated with decoherence of the d_xy-orbital-derived bands.

In this Perspective, members of the Aging Biomarker Consortium outline the X-Age Project, an Aging Biomarker Consortium plan for building standardized aging clocks in China. The authors discuss the project roadmap and its aims of decoding aging heterogeneity, detecting accelerated aging early and evaluating geroprotective interventions.

Somatic mutations accumulate with age and have been linked to functional decline and disease. Single-cell analysis of human cartilage samples from donors with and without osteoarthritis shows that somatic mutations accumulate with age, but, in osteoarthritis, they show distinct mutational patterns and slower accumulation, possibly due to DNA-damage-induced chondrocyte death.

Humans have altered plant biogeography by introducing species from one region to another, but an analysis of how naturalized plant species affect the uniqueness of regional floras around the world was missing. This study presents an analysis using data from native and naturalized alien floras in 658 regions, finding strong taxonomic and phylogenetic floristic homogenization overall.

Multielectron molecular CO₂ reduction in acid is challenged by weak CO binding and competing hydrogen evolution. Here a methanol Faradaic efficiency of 62% is achieved in acid by tuning the microenvironment with cationic, hydrophobic and aerophilic layers.

Trained and validated on multimodal data from 14.5 million images from multicountry datasets, a foundation model is shown to increase diagnostic and referral accuracy of clinicians when used as an assistant in a trial involving 16 ophthalmologists and 668 patients.

The study of isotopes away from the beta stability valley is crucial for the understanding of nuclear structure, especially for neutron-deficient heavy nuclei. Here, the authors report the observation of the alpha-decay isotope 210-protactinium (Pa), extending the alpha-decay systematics of underexplored regions of the nuclides chart.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

The role Tibetan Plateau uplift played in Asian inland aridification remains unclear due to a paucity of accurately dated records. Here, the authors present a continuous aeolian sequence for the period >51–39 Ma, analysis of which indicates that aridification was driven by global climatic forcing rather than uplift.

The study revealed how nitrogen fertilization affects fast and slow turnover pools of soil organic carbon differently. The authors found labile particulate organic carbon increased if SOC was below 1.5%, while stable mineral associated organic carbon increased above this critical threshold.

The variability in clinical outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 infection is partly due to deficiencies in production or response to type I interferons (IFN). Here, the authors describe a FIP200-dependent lysosomal degradation pathway, independent of canonical autophagy and type I IFN, that restricts SARS-CoV-2 replication, offering insights into critical COVID-19 pneumonia mechanisms.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Using globally consistent measurements and high-resolution modelling, this study finds that black carbon emissions are generally underestimated in the Global South.

An analysis of 2,954 genomes from 38 cancer subtypes identified 19,166 retrotransposition events in 35% of samples. Aberrant LINE-1 retrotranspositions can lead to the deletion of tumor-suppressor genes as well as the amplification of oncogenes.

The flagship paper of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium describes the generation of the integrative analyses of 2,658 cancer whole genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types, the structures for international data sharing and standardized analyses, and the main scientific findings from across the consortium studies.

A pan-cancer genomic analysis reports the effects of structural variations on chromatin domains (TADs). Most TAD disruptions do not result in appreciable changes in expression of nearby genes.

A temperature-controlled vacuum quenching method enables the fabrication of perovskite solar modules with a power conversion efficiency of 22.69% and an area of 11.7 cm², while the corresponding cells maintain over 93% of their initial efficiency after 3,500 h of operation.

Stratified medicine promises to tailor treatment for individual patients, however it remains a major challenge to leverage genetic risk data to aid patient stratification. Here the authors introduce an approach to stratify individuals based on the aggregated impact of their genetic risk factor profiles on tissue-specific gene expression levels, and highlight its ability to identify biologically meaningful and clinically actionable patient subgroups, supporting the notion of different patient ‘biotypes’ characterized by partially distinct disease mechanisms.

Superconductivity mediated by phonons is usually conventional due to isotropic electron-phonon coupling. Here, Wang et al. report highly anisotropic phonons only along [001] direction in Sr_0.1Bi₂Se₃, indicating a singular electron-phonon coupling which favors a p-wave nematic superconductivity scenario.

Xenon is an inert element at ambient conditions but may become reactive under pressure. It has now been predicted that pressure stabilizes increasing oxidation states of Xe atoms (from Xe⁰ to Xe²⁺ to Xe⁴⁺ to Xe⁶⁺), and thus a series of compounds — XeO, XeO₂ and XeO₃ — become thermodynamically stable at megabar pressures.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.

Whole-genome sequencing data from more than 2,500 cancers of 38 tumour types reveal 16 signatures that can be used to classify somatic structural variants, highlighting the diversity of genomic rearrangements in cancer.

The authors experimentally study nonlinear light propagation with tunable dispersion, which mimics the effect of fractional derivatives. The pulses have the unique features that their spectra have a discontinuous derivative and they decay slowly in time.

Despite the importance of osteoclast secretory lysosomes in bone digestion, the proteins that regulate them remain ill defined. Here, the authors identify Slc37a2 as a secretory lysosome sugar transporter that is required for maintenance of skeletal bone mass.

There’s an emerging body of evidence to show how biological sex impacts cancer incidence, treatment and underlying biology. Here, using a large pan-cancer dataset, the authors further highlight how sex differences shape the cancer genome.

Tailored to provide diabetes management recommendations from large training and validation datasets, an artificial intelligence system integrating language and computer vision capabilities is shown to improve self-management of patients in a prospective implementation study.

Iridium-based electrocatalysts are traditional anode catalysts for proton exchange membrane water electrolysis but suffer from high cost and low reserves. An alternative, nickel-stabilized ruthenium dioxide catalyst with high activity and durability in acidic oxygen evolution reaction for water electrolysis is reported.

Weak perturbations couple solitons—nonlinear pulses—to low-amplitude linear waves. Longstanding mathematical results indicate that this phenomenon is universal. The authors verify these predictions experimentally by demonstrating that the coupling amplitude satisfies a general scaling law.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

Cancers evolve as they progress under differing selective pressures. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, the authors present the method TrackSig the estimates evolutionary trajectories of somatic mutational processes from single bulk tumour data.

In this study the authors consider the structural variants (SVs) present within cancer cases of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium. They report hundreds of genes, including known cancer-associated genes for which the nearby presence of a SV breakpoint is associated with altered expression.

Understanding deregulation of biological pathways in cancer can provide insight into disease etiology and potential therapies. Here, as part of the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium, the authors present pathway and network analysis of 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumour types.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

Observational analyses from the China Kadoorie Biobank found that alcohol consumption was associated with higher risks of 61 diseases in Chinese men, with most of these associations confirmed by genetic analyses.

High-strength nanocrystalline materials come at the expense of tensile ductility, thermal stability, and electrical conductivity. Here the authors report a nanodispersion-in-nanograins strategy where ultra-nano-carbon was used to concurrently achieve above four mutually exclusive properties.

A genome-wide association study meta-analysis combined with multiomics data of osteoarthritis identifies 700 effector genes as well as biological processes with a convergent involvement of multiple effector genes; 10% of these genes express the target of approved drugs.

The characterization of 4,645 whole-genome and 19,184 exome sequences, covering most types of cancer, identifies 81 single-base substitution, doublet-base substitution and small-insertion-and-deletion mutational signatures, providing a systematic overview of the mutational processes that contribute to cancer development.

It is challenging to directly characterize mechanical properties of soft 3D cardiac organoids with current sensors. Here the authors report an electronic skin-based all-soft organoid-sensing system which can wirelessly monitor minute force profiles of cardiac organoids in real-time in-situ.

Transfer of faecal microbiota from hepatocellular carcinoma patients to mice promotes carcinogenesis via live gut pathogenic Klebsiella pneumoniae translocating to the liver.

In somatic cells the mechanisms maintaining the chromosome ends are normally inactivated; however, cancer cells can re-activate these pathways to support continuous growth. Here, the authors characterize the telomeric landscapes across tumour types and identify genomic alterations associated with different telomere maintenance mechanisms.

Viral pathogen load in cancer genomes is estimated through analysis of sequencing data from 2,656 tumors across 35 cancer types using multiple pathogen-detection pipelines, identifying viruses in 382 genomic and 68 transcriptome datasets.

The authors present SVclone, a computational method for inferring the cancer cell fraction of structural variants from whole-genome sequencing data.

A deep learning algorithm shows promising performance in predicting progression to diabetic retinopathy in patients, up to 5 years in advance, potentially providing support for medical treatment decisions and indications for personalized screening frequency in a real-world cohort.

Spatially resolved images of M87 obtained at a wavelength of 3.5 mm in 2018 show a ring-like accretion structure, the inner (outer) edge of which connects the black hole (jet).