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This study finds that plastic mulch substantially increases crop yields but also contaminates soils and pollutes the environment. The authors propose biodegradable films, AI-driven farming, and policy reforms to address the productivity–sustainability trade-offs.

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.

Chen et al. report a tailored self-assembled monolayer to create a localized 2D/3D perovskite heterojunction. This strategy reduces interfacial loss, achieving photovoltages >90% of thermodynamic limit for wide-bandgap cells, and enables perovskite-organic tandem solar cells with efficiency of 27.11%.

Large-effect variants in autism remain elusive. Here, the authors use long-read sequencing to assemble phased genomes for 189 individuals, identifying pathogenic variants in TBL1XR1, MECP2, and SYNGAP1, plus nine candidate structural variants missed by short-read methods.

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.

This study uses single-nucleus RNA sequencing to analyze lung tissue from 141 individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Distinct patterns of spatially resolved changes in cell composition and cell states that correlate with clinical features are highlighted.

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.

There is a lack of effective therapies for patients with non-V600E BRAF mutant cancer. Here, the authors report limited response in a phase II trial investigating the combination of binimetinib (MEK inhibitor) and encorafenib (BRAF inhibitor) for the treatment of non-V600E BRAF mutant cancer and subsequently investigate resistance mechanisms and combination therapeutic strategies in patient-derived models.

A soft robotic probe enables continuous in utero monitoring of fetal physiological parameters, including heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, temperature and electrocardiogram data, during open or fetoscopic surgery to provide real-time information on fetal condition and distress.

Global Burden of Disease estimates show that between 1990 and 2023, the prevalence and burden of drug use disorders, inclusive of amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine and opioid use, have been increasing in high-income countries, particularly in the USA.

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.

The authors present a federated learning framework for battery fault detection in electric vehicles using charging station data. It enables privacy-preserving collaboration among data owners, creating customized models that improve fault detection accuracy and generalization across diverse data distributions.

Fast panoramic rotational ultrasound tomography and photoacoustic tomography are integrated for hybrid rotational ultrasound and photoacoustic tomography, for three-dimensional dual-contrast imaging of soft tissue and vasculature across the human body.

The ALICE Collaboration provides details on the microscopic mechanism that ends up creating antideuteron in high-energy proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

Engineered mucus-tethering bispecific nanobodies neutralize and entrap viruses to enhance mucosal immunity, preventing influenza infection and limiting SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

Micromitophagy is found to occur in plant male germline cells, mediated by ATG5–HSP90.2 signalling, and is evolutionarily conserved in angiosperms. This mechanism underpins paternal mitochondrial elimination and supports the zygote-to-embryo transition.

Detection of hot intracluster gas in SPT2349−56 with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array provides new insights into early cluster formation.

An integrated optical parametric amplifier on thin-film lithium niobate achieves more than 17 dB gain with less than 200 mW input power.

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.

DBiTplus represents an integrated experimental and computational workflow that unifies sequencing-based and imaging-based spatial omics, demonstrated by combining transcriptomic profiling and multiplexed protein imaging on the same tissue section.

Zhang et al. design a nanostructure which activates an adaptive martensitic transformation mechanism in a nuclear grade austenitic stainless steel, achieving extraordinary radiation resistance with non-degraded mechanical properties.

Federated learning (FL) algorithms have emerged as a promising solution to train models for healthcare imaging across institutions while preserving privacy. Here, the authors describe the Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) challenge for the decentralised benchmarking of FL algorithms and evaluation of Healthcare AI algorithm generalizability in real-world cancer imaging datasets.

Mapping of the neutrophil compartment using single-cell transcriptional data from multiple physiological and patological states reveals its organizational architecture and how cell state dynamics and trajectories vary during health, inflammation and cancer.

The inter-system crossing induced by selenium may undesirably enhance formation of triplet excitons in non-fullerene acceptors, leading to increased non-radiative losses. Here, the authors introduce achiral N-alkyl substituents, achieving maximum efficiency of 20.4% for ternary organic solar cells.

Extrachromosomal circular DNAs (ecDNAs) are prevalent in human cancers and are thought to drive tumor evolution and drug resistance by amplifying oncogenes. Here, authors develop ec3D to reconstruct three-dimensional ecDNA structures, revealing how their spatial organization rewires regulatory circuits.

A protein biomarker, the NOTCH3 extracellular domain, identifies individuals with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension, correlates with disease progression, improves mortality risk prediction and provides a readily implementable, noninvasive blood test for this disease.

Two-dimensional poly(arylene vinylene) frameworks are promising polymer semiconductors, yet obtaining highly crystalline materials is a major challenge. Now a series of 11 highly crystalline or single-crystalline 2D poly(arylene vinylene)s have been prepared—from 2D imine-linked covalent organic frameworks through a Mannich-elimination strategy—with diverse lattices, enhanced conjugation and specific surface areas up to 2,000 m² g⁻¹.

In targeted protein degradation, a degrader molecule brings a neosubstrate protein proximal to a hijacked E3 ligase for its ubiquitination. Here, pseudo-natural products derived from (−)-myrtanol—iDegs—are identified to inhibit and induce degradation of the immunomodulatory enzyme indoleamine-2,3-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1) by a distinct mechanism. iDegs prime apo-IDO1 ubiquitination and subsequent degradation using its native proteolytic pathway.

Researchers studied the blood-based metabolome of over 23,000 people from ten ethnically diverse cohorts. They identified 235 metabolites associated with future risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D). By integrating genetic and modifiable lifestyle factors, their findings provide insights into T2D mechanisms and could improve risk prediction and inform precision prevention.

This work presents a fully implantable wireless optogenetic device that delivers spatiotemporally patterned cortical stimulation through the skull and generates artificial perception in mice.

Self-supervised reconstruction structured illumination microscopy (SSR-SIM) is a reconstruction approach for SIM that improves image reconstruction by including light modulation priors and information on reconstruction artifacts, while simultaneously eliminating the need for ground-truth images. The improvements allow long-term imaging of sensitive cellular processes.

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.

Amorphous films with tunable thermal conductivity are needed for semiconductor/aerospace fields. Amorphous Al(Ti)N nanoparticles have negligible effect on thermal conductivity of Si₃N₄ 2 W m⁻¹K⁻¹, while incorporating crystal TiN phases increases to 15 W m⁻¹K⁻¹.

The Einstein Probe has discovered a fast X-ray transient, EP240414a, associated with a broad-lined type Ic supernova. Its unusually soft spectrum and weak jet add to the diversity of stellar deaths and suggest a previously unknown Wolf–Rayet star explosion mechanism.

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 early detection of degradation in lithium-ion batteries is crucial for effective predictive maintenance and recycling. Here, the authors propose a two-stage early-stage degradation prediction method based on GPT to predict the charging data of and state-of-health of batteries

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.

Here, the authors report an exome-wide association study for multi-organ imaging traits by leveraging recent bioinformatic tools such as AlphaMissense. The identified signals elucidate the genetic effects from rare variants on human organs and their connections to complex diseases

Quantum lock-in detection (QLID) is crucial for extracting oscillating signals from noise, while quantum entanglement is vital to surpass the standard of quantum limit in precision measurement. Here, the authors experimentally realise entanglement-enhanced QLID using two trapped ions, achieving frequency measurement precision at the Heisenberg limit and demonstrating an improved inverse-quadratic temporal scaling.

Most of the world’s food relies on nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, but how efficiently crops use these nutrients has remained unclear globally. This study provides global-scale evidence of persistently low nutrient use efficiency with clear crop- and region-specific patterns, offering insights to guide sustainable fertilizer management.

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.

Kozai, Fernandez-Martinez et al. use high-speed atomic force microscopy to study the permeability barrier of yeast nuclear pore complexes. They show that karyopherins remodel a central plug that shapes barrier dynamics and disorder within the pore.

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.

Beck et al. develop a model where striosomes create a flexible “decision-space” that adapts to environmental context and internal state. It explains how we make choices and why decision-making varies between people, and in neuropsychiatric disorders.

In returning Thouless pumping, the quantized charge is pumped during the first half of the cycle and returns to zero during the second. Here, authors demonstrate returning Thouless pumping experimentally with a symmetry-protected delicate topological insulator, made of a two-dimensional acoustic crystal.

SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, necessitating updated vaccines and therapeutics. Here the authors identify three broadly binding antibodies from vaccinated or infected individuals, characterize their conserved non-overlapping RBD epitopes by structural analysis and demonstrate protective effects in a hamster model.

Photonic time crystals (PTCs) have unveiled unusual band structures and phenomena due to temporal modulation of optical properties. Here, the authors address non-Hermitian features of PTCs within a purely Hermitian Hamiltonian description, bridging classical and quantum approaches.

Previous ophthalmic foundation models have struggled to generalize effectively to diverse and rare fundus diseases, restricting their clinical applicability. Here, the authors introduce a vision-language foundation model that demonstrates superior performance in diagnosing both common and rare fundus conditions.