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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Tree ectomycorrhizal colonization in aridity regions is supported by microbial cooperation, where bacteria attach to fungal hyphae and reduce inhibitory soil metabolites, suggesting a microbiome-based strategy for tree restoration.

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.

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.

The enzyme PCMT1 was found to install a C-terminal cyclic imide modification on proteins that marks them for degradation by CRBN, uncovering a conserved protein turnover pathway with implications in metabolism and neurological function.

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

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.

Alternative polyadenylation is involved in plant responses to various stresses. Here, the authors show how a cis-natural antisense RNA promotes proximal polyadenylation of its cognate SlSPX5 gene in response to phosphate starvation in tomato.

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.

MMCLKin is a multimodal and multiscale contrastive learning framework for kinase-inhibitor affinity prediction, kinase inhibitor selectivity profiling, virtual screening for known, unknown, and mutated kinases, and interpretable analysis.

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.

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.

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.

The human host factors LSD1, CoREST and ZNF217 are important in maintaining Epstein–Barr virus latency, and the depletion of these factors or inhibition of LSD1 can trigger Epstein–Barr virus reactivation and sensitize infected cells to ganciclovir treatment.

Creative experiences such as dance, music, drawing, and strategy video games might preserve brain health. The authors show that regular practice or short training in these activities is linked to brains that look younger and work more efficiently.

Hi-C methods for studying 3D genome structure typically require millions of cells and struggle with repetitive regions. Here, authors develop CiFi, combining 3C with PacBio HiFi sequencing, enabling chromatin analysis from as few as 60,000 cells and chromosome-scale assembly from small samples.

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.

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.

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.

GM4951 is a GTPase in hepatic lipid metabolism. Here, the authors determine the atomic structure of GM4951, which forms a tail-to-tail dimer essential for lipid droplet localization. MASLD-linked mutations destabilize the protein and alter the dynamics of switch loops of the GTPase domain.

Topological states are exploited based on crystalline symmetry, but under artificial gauge fields, symmetries may satisfy projective algebras, which remains less studied. Here, the authors reveal that projective symmetry algebra leads to momentum-space nonsymmorphic symmetry, resulting in new topological states over a momentum-space Klein bottle.

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.

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.

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.

Diluted magnetic semiconductors are promising spintronic materials, however the simultaneous doping of charge and magnetic moment has prevented synthesis of bulk samples. This work reports the synthesis of a bulk magnetic semiconductor (Ba_1−xK_x)(Zn_1−yMn_y)₂As₂with Curie temperatures up to 180 K.

Brain age gaps (BAGs) highlight deviations from healthy brain aging, yet their biophysical underpinnings in aging and dementia are not well understood. Here, the authors use EEG connectivity and generative modeling across diverse populations to reveal that BAGs are influenced by geography, income, sex and education, with implications for understanding accelerated aging and dementia.

Polygenic scores for body mass index and obesity constructed using data from 5 million people with different ancestries were associated with distinct weight gain trajectories from early childhood to adulthood.

Here the authors provide an explanation for 95% of examined predicted loss of function variants found in disease-associated haploinsufficient genes in the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), underscoring the power of the presented analysis to minimize false assignments of disease risk.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Developing porous crystalline materials with tailored properties is challenging because of the vast design space and the high cost of screening. Now, highly fluorescent covalent organic frameworks have been identified through an AI-assisted iterative experiment–learning cycle workflow that integrates electronic configuration and quantum-level insights into the learning process.

cfDNA fragmentomics is a potential clinically applicable method for identifying cancer. Here, the authors assess fragmentomics analysis methods and their application to commercial targeted sequencing panels.

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.

GIANT, a genetically informed brain atlas, integrates genetic heritability with neuroanatomy. It shows strong neuroanatomical validity and surpasses traditional atlases in discovery power for brain imaging genomics.

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.

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.

In plants, the MMC represents the precursor of the female germline. Here, the authors show that SPL/NZZ, together with ovule-identity MADS-domain transcription factors, controls MMC differentiation by acting on an auxin-dependent downstream network.