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N input and warming alter plant traits and mycorrhizal communities, reducing belowground C inputs and stable soil organic C while accelerating decomposition, highlighting root–mycorrhizal interactions as key regulators of soil C under global change.

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.

Low outcrossing rate of sterile lines limits hybrid rice seed production. Here, the authors report that mutation of a SET domain-containing protein HER1 leads to enlarged stigma, enhanced stigma exsertion, and hybrid seed production in rice.

Climate change is expected to release carbon stored in permafrost soils. Sampling of sites across the Tibetan Plateau in the early 2000s and early 2010s reveals increased carbon stocks in shallow soils, which may offset losses from deeper soils.

This study benchmarks four cutting-edge spatial transcriptomics platforms using human tumour tissues, performs multi-metric evaluation with multi-omics references, and presents the SPATCH portal for visualisation and download.

SOX2 is known to be oncogenic in squamous cell carcinomas. Here, the authors demonstrate that SOX2 promotes global histone acetylation and reprograms lipid metabolism in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma cells.

High frequency microwave is crucial for communication and radar applications. The authors develop a compact Kerr comb for photonic THz generation with near quantum limited noise performance, enabling record-breaking 240 Gbps wireless communication.

Solvent leakage and simplistic device designs limit the fabrication of stable and multimodal ionotronic sensors. Li et al. fabricate various sensor architectures including those without signal crosstalk using a printable, leakage-resistant polyelectrolyte elastomer and a multi-material 3D printing technique.

Conventional iontronic pressure sensors suffer from signal drift and inaccuracy owing to creep of soft materials and ion leakage. Here the authors report a leakage-free and creep-free polyelectrolyte-elastomer-based iontronic sensor that achieves a drift rate two to three orders of magnitude lower than those of conventional iontronic sensors.

Wastewater treatment plants are important reservoirs of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Here, the authors analyze ARGs in a global collection of samples from wastewater treatment plants across six continents, providing insights into biotic and abiotic mechanisms that appear to control ARG diversity and distribution.

Rare genetic variants in UNC93B1 predispose to childhood-onset lupus via TLR7/-8–IRAK1/-4, validated with a corresponding mouse model.

Global sampling of microbial communities associated with wastewater treatment plants and application of ecological theory revealed a small, core bacterial community associated with performance and provides insights into the community dynamics in this environment.

Stretchable materials with low hysteresis and strong adhesion are desirable, though balancing these properties is challenging. Here the authors design a polymer with mechanical heterogeneities using an oxygen-inhibition mechanism affording a hyper-elastic and adhesive material.

There is interest in hot exciton materials with multi-colour emission from solid states of single organic luminescent molecules. Here, the authors report on polymorph dependent differences in emission properties and excited-state behaviours.

The removal of acetylene from ethylene/acetylene mixtures is an industrially important but challenging task. Here the authors report a microporous metal–organic framework with optimized pore/cage space design and chemical functionalization, capable of removing acetylene from low concentration mixtures.

Intermediate soil acidification alters the denitrifier community composition and induces high nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions, which contributes to the observed acceleration of N₂O emissions from global soils

PRS-CSx is a polygenic risk score construction method that improves cross-population polygenic prediction by integrating GWAS summary statistics from multiple populations.

In a randomized phase 3 trial, neoadjuvant anti-PD-1 plus either paclitaxel and cisplatin or nab-paclitaxel and cisplatin elicited a significantly superior pathological complete response rate versus neoadjuvant paclitaxel and cisplatin alone in patients with resectable locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.

The coordination of pro- and anti-regenerative factors is essential for organ regeneration. The authors show here that proenkephalin-A, secreted by proximal renal tubules in zebrafish, negatively regulates hydrogen peroxide production remodelling H3K4me3 in renal progenitor cells and controlling kidney regeneration strength.

Lithium–sulfur batteries are a promising electrochemical energy storage technology; however, they are limited by the dissolution of polysulfide intermediates. Now, it has been shown that sparingly solvating electrolytes containing a phase mediator can avoid polysulfide dissolution and accelerate surface-localized solution-phase sulfur reaction to improve battery performances.

Agricultural soil C dynamics under climate change are difficult to predict. Here, the authors report that experimental warming increases soil organic C stocks in conservation agriculture but not in conventional agriculture, which appears driven by soil microbial responses to no tillage and C inputs from the crops.

Efferocytosis inhibition leads to the release of immunogenic contents into the tumor microenvironment. Here the authors developed a nanosystem that inhibits MerTK-mediated efferocytosis and captures tumor-associated agents to enhance antitumour immunity.

A polygenic risk score for coronary artery disease developed using data from individuals of five different ancestries has increased accuracy across diverse populations.

Sensing and processing UV light is essential for advanced artificial visual perception system. Here, the authors report a controllable UV-ultrasensitive neuromorphic vision sensor using organic phototransistors to integrate sensing, memory and processing functions, and perform the static image and dynamic movie recognition.

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias identifies new loci and enables generation of a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Using a multifactorial global change experiment, the authors show that warming grassland plots by +3 °C over 6 years accelerates the scaling rate of both taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity in soil bacterial and fungal communities.

Mechanisms and consequences of the acclimation of soil respiration to warming are unclear. Here, the authors combine soil respiration, metagenomics, and functional gene results from a 7-year grassland warming experiment to a microbial-enzyme decomposition model, showing functional gene information to lower uncertainty and improve fit.

Climate warming has a wide range of effects on biodiversity. Here, Zhou et al. show that although variation in environmental temperature is a primary driver of soil microbial biodiversity, microbes show much lower rates of turnover across temperature gradients than other major taxa.

Here the authors report a tin anode design by encapsulating tin nanoparticles in graphene tubes. The design exhibits high capacity, good rate performance and cycling stability. Pairing with NMC, the full cell delivers a volumetric energy density twice as high as that for the commercial cell.