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Global analysis of obesity trends from 1980 to 2024 in 200 countries and territories using data from 4,050 population-based studies reveals that framing obesity as a single global epidemic masks the highly varied dynamics across countries and age groups.

Here they assemble a cross-species single-cell transcriptomic atlas of mammalian placentas and show that trophoblast diversification underlies placental evolution, while identifying TGIF1 as a regulator associated with preeclampsia and pregnancy loss.

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.

A hierarchical Al₃Ti/Al composite with high strength and modulus at elevated temperatures is developed incorporating high-energy ball milling-controlled in-situ reaction between Ti₂AlC and Al, through activating the internal decomposition in Ti₂AlC.

Tin-lead perovskites enable tandem devices to surpass the Shockley-Queisser limit, but oxidation of tin severely degrades film quality and performance. Jiang et al. stabilize bulk and surface with two natural antioxidants, boosting both single- and tandem-device efficiency and stability.

Soil microbes drive ecosystem functions but are vulnerable to environmental stressors triggered by global change. This study reveals that multiple environmental stressors drive community-level restructuring of soil functional microbiomes globally.

This study develops an urban climate-energy modeling framework to assess community energy resilience under climate risks, revealing increased disparities in New York City and supporting resilient and equitable energy system planning.

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

Using warming microcosms across 100 paired sites, a global meta-analysis and microbiome manipulation experiments, this study shows that agricultural microbiomes confer higher compositional and multifunctionality resistance to warming and can transfer this resistance to natural soils.

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.

Atomistic simulations reveal how HIV-1 capsid proteins transition from immature to mature forms. By identifying the molecular pathway, a metastable intermediate, and energetics, these findings highlight the stepwise conformational changes and key interactions that stabilize the mature capsid.

Restricting or permitting H3K27me3 spreading concentrates or dilutes canonical PRC1 (cPRC1), respectively, which affects three-dimensional chromatin interactions. Disruption of cPRC1 compromises repression of Polycomb target genes and induces differentiation and tumor regression in H3K27M-mutant glioma.

Short-read sequencing-based approaches are limited to gene-level expression and cannot identify full-length transcript isoforms. Here, the authors apply single-cell long-read RNA sequencing to glioblastoma and identify tumor-specific isoforms and peptides deriving from them as neoantigens.

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.

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.

Non-Hermitian systems support non-trivial topological effects, yet eigenvalue braiding remains difficult to control and observe. Now, active tuning of laser modes enables programmable and directly observable braiding on an integrated photonic chip.

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.

A cross-organ, multi-omics U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and biological ageing clocks highlights the potential of sleep optimization to promote healthy ageing, lower disease risk and extend longevity.

PTCHD1-AS, which encodes a long non-coding RNA, is associated with the aetiology of autism spectrum disorder in humans through striatal molecular and circuit-level dysregulation.

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.

Structured liquid droplets exhibit asymmetric division in the absence of reconstituted protein machinery.

Gender stereotypes contribute to gender disparities. We find that children enter school expecting teachers to hold gender stereotypes and view acting on these beliefs as acceptable, highlighting a potential early obstacle to educational equity.

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.

Forward and reverse genetics identifies the mode of action of clofazimine in the parasite Cryptosporidium. The genomic locus encoding the target is heterogeneous, and a resistance-conferring allele is already widely distributed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.