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What is the best way for predators to find food when prey is sparse and distributed unpredictably? Theory predicts that in such circumstances predators should adopt a Lé-flight strategy, in which short exploratory hops are occasionally interspersed with longer trips. When prey is abundant, simple Brownian motion should suffice. Now, analysis of a large data set of marine predators establishes that animals do indeed adopt Lévy-flight foraging when prey is sparse, and Brownian episodes when prey is abundant.

Lévy walks, accompanied by heavy-tailed step distributions, are observed in diverse systems. Through simulations of high-energy heavy-ion collisions and comparisons to experimental data, the authors show that the pion spatial freeze-out distributions are describable by three-dimensional Lévy-stable distributions, hence supporting the appearance of Lévy walks in another area of Nature.

Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.

Literature produced inconsistent findings regarding the links between extreme weather events and climate policy support across regions, populations and events. This global study offers a holistic assessment of these relationships and highlights the role of subjective attribution.

In the primary report of a phase 1b trial, adeno-associated virus gene therapy with fordadistrogene movaparvovec in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy was well tolerated in an ambulatory cohort, and mini-dystrophin expression was increased in the high-dose cohort.

Study shows PTSD predisposition shares distinct genes and genomic regions with several cardiovascular conditions. Here the findings reveal neuronal, immune, and metabolic pathways, and repurposed drug targets that further the understanding of the comorbidity.

In CHIP, somatic mutations in a hematopoietic stem cell lead to a clonal subpopulation of blood cells. Here, the authors perform a CHIP meta-EWAS to establish its epigenetic features and age-related outcomes.

The validation of inhibitors targeting PurF, a novel drug target for tuberculosis drug discovery, is described.

Analyses of genome and exome sequencing data identify rare coding and structural variants associated with atrial fibrillation and highlight genetic links between atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathies.

Analysis of snRNA genes in individuals with rare disorders identifies de novo and recurrent variants in RNU5B-1 and RNU5A-1, in addition to previously unreported cases with pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in RNU4-2.

McNamee et al. develop a theory of entorhinal–hippocampal processing. Distributed entorhinal input drives hippocampal activity between distinct statistical and dynamical regimes of activity, thereby unifying several empirical observations.

This Perspective outlines how financial levies on fisheries bycatch may aid biodiversity conservation both directly, by incentivizing bycatch prevention, and indirectly, through raising revenue that could be directed towards compensatory conservation.

MultiSTAAR provides a general and flexible statistical framework for functionally informed multi-trait rare variant analysis of biobank-scale sequencing studies by jointly analyzing multiple traits and incorporating annotation information.

Here, the authors show that signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) has dual functions in small cell lung cancer as its deletion inhibited primary tumor growth but boosted metastatic spread. These seemingly opposing functions are a result of the requirement of STAT3 for stimulator of interferon genes–interferon signaling in metastasis and the authors show how it can be targeted in mice.

Using data from a single time point, passenger-approximated clonal expansion rate (PACER) estimates the fitness of common driver mutations that lead to clonal haematopoiesis and identifies TCL1A activation as a mediator of clonal expansion.

Longevity research aims to extend lifespan and reduce sickspan in aging. Here, the authors show that only interventions that steepen survival curves can compress the sickspan relative to lifespan.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Many genetic loci have been identified to be associated with kidney disease, but the molecular mechanisms are not well understood. Here, the authors perform epigenome-wide association studies on kidney function measures to identify epigenetic marks and pathways involved in kidney function.

Analysis of more than 95% of each diploid human genome of a four-generation, twenty-eight-member family using five complementary short-read and long-read sequencing technologies provides a truth set to understand the most fundamental processes underlying human genetic variation.

Serum urate concentration can be studied in large datasets to find genetic and epigenetic loci that may be related to cardiometabolic traits. Here the authors identify and replicate 100 urate-associated CpGs, which provide insights into urate GWAS loci and shared CpGs of urate and cardiometabolic traits.

Genome-wide association analysis in over one million individuals of European ancestry identifies 2,103 independent genetic signals (including 113 new loci) associated with blood pressure traits.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Daniel Chasman, Daniel Levy, Christopher Newton-Cheh, Georg Ehret and colleagues perform an association meta-analysis for blood pressure in ∼330,000 individuals and identify 31 new risk loci, implicating biological pathways related to vascular function and cardiometabolic traits. Their findings highlight potential therapeutic strategies for hypertension, emphasizing a link with cardiometabolic risk.

What is the state of trust in scientists around the world? To answer this question, the authors surveyed 71,922 respondents in 68 countries and found that trust in scientists is moderately high.

Analysis of 97,691 high-coverage human blood DNA-derived whole-genome sequences enabled simultaneous identification of germline and somatic mutations that predispose individuals to clonal expansion of haematopoietic stem cells, indicating that both inherited and acquired mutations are linked to age-related cancers and coronary heart disease.

The interface between two oxide materials can play host to numerous exotic phenomenon. Here, the authors observe a four order of magnitude change in the conductance at a lanthanum-aluminate–strontium-titanate interface controlled by surface protonation, which can be reversed by exposure to light.

Meta-analyses in up to 1.3 million individuals identify 87 rare-variant associations with blood pressure traits. On average, rare variants exhibit effects ~8 times larger than the mean effects of common variants and implicate candidate causal genes at associated regions.

Daniel Levy and colleagues report a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for blood pressure traits as part of the CHARGE consortium, reporting eight loci with replicated association to systolic and/or diastolic blood pressure, with one of these loci also associated to hypertension.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

A study shows that clonal haematopoiesis of indeterminate potential is associated with an increased risk of chronic liver disease specifically through the promotion of liver inflammation and injury.

In this immunological ancillary study of the PREVAC trial, the authors show that approved Ebola virus vaccines induce memory T-cell responses that persist during the five year follow-up after initial vaccination.

The goals, resources and design of the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) programme are described, and analyses of rare variants detected in the first 53,831 samples provide insights into mutational processes and recent human evolutionary history.

Measurements from the heavily shielded Orion spacecraft during the uncrewed Artemis I mission show dose-rate reductions due to shielding and orientation for Van Allen belt crossings and quantify the interplanetary cosmic-ray radiation in a human-rated spacecraft.

It is hard to design quantum neural networks able to work with quantum data. Here, the authors propose a noise-robust architecture for a feedforward quantum neural network, with qudits as neurons and arbitrary unitary operations as perceptrons, whose training procedure is efficient in the number of layers.

Population genomics and chromosome-level genome assemblies for Leishmania strains circulating in Colombia reveal population structure, copy number variation and evolution of amastin families.

A sequencing chemistry that separates nucleotide identification from nucleotide incorporation achieves high accuracy.