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By combining satellite observations with ground-based data and expert validation, this analysis demonstrates considerable misestimation of grassland extent and thereby carbon stock estimates in previous global assessments based on remote sensing.

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.

Pacheco et al. present new methods for the unbiased recording and cataloging of sensory activity throughout the Drosophila brain and across trials and individuals. They find auditory activity is temporally diverse but present in neurons throughout nearly all central brain regions.

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.

Cosgun et al. show that, in B cell leukemia, β-catenin expression is maintained at low levels through glycogen synthase kinase 3B (GSK3β)-mediated phosphorylation. Inhibition of GSK3β results in β-catenin–Ikaros–NuRD complex formation, leading to B-ALL cell death through MYC repression.

Transient manipulation of neural activity is widely used to probe the function of specific circuits, yet such targeted perturbations could also have indirect effects on downstream circuits that implement separate and independent functions; a study to test this reveals that transient perturbations of specific circuits in mammals and songbirds severely impair learned skills that recover spontaneously after permanent lesions of the same brain areas.

Manipulating perineuronal nets (PNNs) in the motor nucleus HVC of zebra finches alters the structure of vocalizations acquired during development, highlighting a causal contribution of PNNs in motor circuitry to the performance of learned behaviors.

Enhancing utilization of single atoms is crucial but challenging in electrocatalysis. Here, the authors present a surfactant-assisted freezecasting method to optimize nanocarbon micro- and macrostructures, achieving near-100% site utilization and enhancing single-atom catalyst performance.

Plant growth and development respond to environmental cues. Here the authors infer gene regulatory networks controlling sieve element differentiation and show that under iron deficiency, enucleation and, consequently, phloem sap translocation are delayed.

This study shows that oxygen-vacancy planar defects greatly enhance polarization in (Bi, Na)TiO₃-based thin films via local flexoelectric effects, enabling strong performance and thermal stability for low-power electronic applications.

Animal models of drug use require specialized technical expertise and often differ from how humans consume drugs. Here, the authors establish a robust method which allows mice to self-administer intranasal cocaine, greatly improving face validity and ease of use.

Here the authors report NiGa₂O_4–x(OH)_y for light-driven CO₂ hydrogenation to methanol. The surface Lewis acid–base pairs and -OH groups act as conduits for H^- /H⁺ transport to active sites, enhancing photocatalytic methanol production.

Pretrained using 335,645 whole-slide images, a foundation model is developed to provide representations for slide- and patient-level tasks. It is capable of performing clinical tasks and generating reports even in data-scarce scenarios, such as rare cancer diagnosis and survival prediction, without requiring further fine-tuning.

Birdsong has long connected humans to nature. Historical reconstructions using bird monitoring and song recordings collected by citizen scientists reveal that the soundscape of birdsong in North America and Europe is both quieter and less varied, mirroring declines in bird diversity and abundance.

Chronic care manages long-term, progressive conditions, while acute care handles short-term ones. Here, authors show chronic conditions account for most of the global health burden, with 68% of DALYs and 93% of YLDs attributed to chronic care needs.

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 study analyses data from NASA’s MMS mission to examine electromagnetic fluctuations in the electron diffusion region of Earth’s magnetotail offering insights into the link between reconnection and turbulence. It finds that electromagnetic anomalous viscosity supplies, at times, around 20% of the reconnection electric field.

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.

The emission of entangled photon pairs from layered materials is attractive for quantum applications, but its observation in monolayers has remained elusive. Here, the authors report co- and counter-propagating photon pair emission in the telecom range from monolayer GaSe and the observation of high-fidelity Bell states in the counterpropagating configuration.

Wastewater-based surveillance tends to focus on specific pathogens. Here, the authors mapped the wastewater virome from 62 cities worldwide to identify over 2,500 viruses, revealing city-specific virome fingerprints and showing that wastewater metagenomics enables early detection of emerging viruses.

Isotope engineering can enhance spin coherence of solid-state defects, such as NV centers in diamond but progress for defects in hBN has been limited. Gong et al. report the optimization of isotopes in hBN and demonstrate improved coherence and relaxation times for the negatively charged boron vacancy centers.

The genome of the zebra finch — a songbird and a model for studying the vertebrate brain, behaviour and evolution — has been sequenced. Comparison with the chicken genome, the only other bird genome available, shows that genes that have neural function and are implicated in the cognitive processing of song have been evolving rapidly in the finch lineage. Moreover, vocal communication engages much of the transcriptome of the zebra finch brain.

Using a battery of statistical tools, Alagöz et al. examine the genetic overlap between dyslexia and rhythm impairment and shed light on how the genome influences the neural bases of human language and musicality.

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

While Bell inequalities have been violated several times—mostly in photonic systems—their violations within particle physics experiments are less explored. Here, the BESIII Collaboration showcases Bell-violating nonlocal correlations between entangled hyperon pairs.

The LHCb experiment at CERN has observed significant asymmetries between the decay rates of the beauty baryon and its CP-conjugated antibaryon, thus demonstrating CP violation in baryon decays.

Planar oxygen-doped carbon quantum rings (OD-CQRs) are prepared through one-pot solid-state reactions. The synthesized OD-CQRs exhibit a fluorescence peak centre at 393 nm, a full-width at half-maximum of 18 nm and a photoluminescence quantum yield of 95%. Electroluminescent light emitting diodes based on OD-CQRs demonstrate high-colour-purity violet emission.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have improved our understanding of the genetic basis of lung adenocarcinoma but known susceptibility variants explain only a small fraction of the familial risk. Here, the authors perform a two-stage GWAS and report 12 novel genetic loci associated with lung adenocarcinoma in East Asians.

Surface acoustic waves have previously been used, in conjunction with electric currents and assisting magnetic fields, to manipulate magnetization. Here, Rivelles, Yanes, and coauthors succeed in driving magnetic domain walls solely with surface acoustic waves, an important milestone in acoustically controlled spintronic devices.’

Aggregates of misfolded proteins are sequestered in the aggresome via dynein transport in an aggregate size-dependent manner. Here, authors find episodic transport kinetics mediated by aggresome-dynein adapters are central to this size-filter effect.

Engineered polar nanoclusters in tin-doped barium titanate thin films enable microwave tunability of ~74% at 6 GHz under low bias, offering a strategy to achieve high tunability with minimal dielectric loss for microwave communication.

Genomic evolutionary rates are decomposed to identify the dominant lineages and genes driving rate variation across the phylogeny of birds.

A central goal of evolutionary biology is to identify the genetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of morphological novelties. This study reports numerous sequences showing accelerated accumulation of substitutions, and likely to be critical for the evolution of mammal and bird specific traits.

Measuring rhythm priors in 39 participant groups from 15 countries, the authors find that properties of rhythm representations are common across cultures, while variation from place to place related to local musical traditions exists.

A new artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek-R1, is introduced, demonstrating that the reasoning abilities of large language models can be incentivized through pure reinforcement learning, removing the need for human-annotated demonstrations.

Analysis of soundscape data from 139 globally distributed sites reveals that sounds of biological origin exhibit predictable rhythms depending on location and season, whereas sounds of anthropogenic origin are less predictable. Comparisons between paired urban–rural sites show that urban green spaces are noisier and dominated by sounds of technological origin.

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.

The benefits and risks of nature to human health have been studied, however, robust empirical research on forest biodiversity and health outcomes is still lacking. Here the authors use a unique dataset from 164 European forest stands to explore the associations between forest types and well-being.

Thermal lepton pairs are ideal probes for the temperature of quark-gluon plasma. Here, the STAR Collaboration uses thermal electron-positron pair production to measure quark-gluon plasma average temperature at different stages of the evolution.

The semileptonic decay channels of the Λc baryon can give important insights into weak interaction, but decay into a neutron, positron and electron neutrino has not been reported so far, due to difficulties in the final products’ identification. Here, the BESIII Collaboration reports its observation in e+e- collision data, exploiting machine-learning-based identification techniques.

Stable and robust topological edge modes are observed at finite temperatures in an array of 100 programmable superconducting qubits because of emergent symmetries present in the prethermal regime of this system.