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Recently exceptional plasticity has been discovered in defective Bi₂Te₃ crystal. Here, the authors further investigate the plasticity of other Bi₂Te₃-family compounds and then determine the composition range with good plasticity, high power factor and figure-of-merit.

Adult zebrafish possess the ability to regenerate injured hearts through a complex orchestration of molecular and cellular activities. Here, the authors present a single cell and spatially-resolved atlas of the regenerating zebrafish heart, which serves as a valuable resource for research on heart regeneration.

The bacterial pathogen Legionella pneumophila is known to regulate a wide spectrum of host processes using its Dot/Icm effectors. In this work, He et al. provide insight into L. pneumophila regulation of ATP level in host cells.

Tracing cellular changes in complex biological systems is challenging. Here, authors present a flexible framework that integrates multi-sample data with in-house algorithms to infer comparative and spatiotemporal cell-gene patterns, advancing understanding of cellular dynamics.

Heat pumping is in high demand at cryogenic temperature, but whether thermoelectricity can take on cryogenic heat pumping is an open question. Here, the authors answer this question by leveraging bipolar effect to enhance transverse thermoelectricity in semimetal Mg₂Pb for cryogenic heat pumping.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

Wood density is an important plant trait. Data from 1.1 million forest inventory plots and 10,703 tree species show a latitudinal gradient in wood density, with temperature and soil moisture explaining variation at the global scale and disturbance also having a role at the local level.

Thermoelectric materials could be used to convert waste heat into useful electricity, but the ideal substance needs to both optimize the electrical power factor and suppress thermal conductivity. Here, the authors report a high figure of merit of 1.5 at 1,200 K in the p-type half-Heusler alloy FeNbSb.

Although flexible thermoelectric materials based on conducting polymers are attractive for energy harvesting, their performance is inferior to their inorganic counterparts. Here, the authors present a facile method to deliver inorganic nanowire films with high power factor and flexibility.

Inorganic α-Ag₂S semiconductor, which has preferential slip planes in the crystal structure and irregularly distributed bonds of silver atoms preventing cleavage, demonstrates metal-like ductility at room temperature.

The authors show that bulk brittle semiconductors can be plastically manufactured like metals by warm metalworking into free-standing, metre-scale films with decent physical properties.

Detailed knowledge of COVID-19 epidemiology is needed to inform public health responses. Here, the authors use large-scale contact tracing data to provide empirical estimates of key parameters, and show that susceptibility increases with age but transmissibility does not vary significantly.

An annually resolved 3476-year tree-ring record from the Tibetan Plateau reveals severe 20^th century droughts and highlights the interplay between the Asian Monsoon and Westerlies. Droughts are often linked to the collapse of dynasties.

Xun Shi and Lidong Chen summarize recent progress in the field of thermoelectric materials in China, and discuss steps towards the realization of commercially viable devices.

Alternative stable states in forests have implications for the biosphere. Here, the authors combine forest biodiversity observations and simulations revealing that leaf types across temperate regions of the NH follow a bimodal distribution suggesting signatures of alternative forest states.

Whole-genome resequencing and association analyses in 424 soybean accessions identify two homeologous genes that contributed to flowering time adaptation during soybean domestication.

The authors develop a quantitative theory to model and tune the electrical transports during critical phase transitions by incorporating both the band broadening effect and carrier-soft TO phonon interactions.

How soybean, a temperate origin crop, adapted to a tropical environment remains unclear. Here, the authors report Tof16, an ortholog of LHY, and the previously identified J locus, control soybean yield under short-day condition and loss of function of these two genes contributes to the adaptation to tropics.

Hand, foot and mouth disease, caused by enterovirus A71 (EV-A71) infection, is common in children in China. Here, the authors estimate EV-A71 incidence and seroprevalence using data from two longitudinal cohorts and find that, despite high infection rates, a large proportion of children under 6 are susceptible.

Power factor and figure-of-merit values are normally low in flexible thermoelectric materials. Here, the authors fabricate high-performance ductile thermoelectric materials with high power factor and figure-of-merit values near the morphotropic phase boundary in Ag₂Se-Ag₂S pseudobinary compound.

Few-layer semiconducting Cr₂Ge₂Te₆ shows bipolar gate-tuned magnetism below its ferromagnetic Curie temperature.

The authors develop a liquid-phase sintering strategy to effectively enlarge material’s grain sizes, thereby achieving single crystal-like electronic transport properties in polycrystalline Mg₃(Bi, Sb)₂.

Swarms of microrobots could eventually be used to deliver drugs to specific targets in the body, but the coordination of these swarms in complex environments is challenging. Yang and colleagues present a real-time autonomous distribution planning method based on deep learning that controls both the shape and position of the swarm, as well as the imaging system used for swarm navigation to cover longer distances.

The authors introduce ZS-DeconvNet, an unsupervised computational super-resolution method for multiple types of microscopes, that enhances image resolution by more than 1.5 times over the diffraction limit with 10 times lower fluorescence than regular superresolution imaging conditions.

Unsatisfied electrode bonding in half-Heusler devices limits their practical service at high temperatures. Here, the authors develop a direct bonding interface to ideal ohmic contact and thermally inert and ohmic contact, leading to high deficiency.

Mitochondrial DNA is found in nucleoids, which are distributed throughout the mitochondrial network and are thought to be passively distributed. Here, the authors show that mitochondrial dynamic tubulation at ER-mitochondria contact sites actively transports nucleoids.

A common route to obtain efficient thermoelectrics is to optimize the ratio between electrical and thermal conductivity. Typically, materials with a complex, glass-like phonon structure and therefore a very low thermal conductivity are studied. Now, a route showing that solid ions in a liquid-like state can have a low enough thermal conductivity to compete with the best existing thermoelectrics is proposed.

Thermoelectric property of silicon itself is important for the thermal management of post-Moore nanoelectronics. Here, Xue et al directly observe unconventional thermoelectric cooling/heating effects enhanced by hot electrons in silicon nanodevices.

Mixed ionic–electronic conductors are limited by material decomposition. Here the authors reveal the mechanism for atom migration and deposition in Cu_2–δ(S,Se) materials based on a critical chemical potential difference and propose electronically conducting, ion-blocking interfaces to enhance stability.

Today solid-state cooling technologies below 77 K are greatly limited. Here, the authors report the colossal Nernst power factor in NbSb₂ single crystal, providing a high performance thermomagnetic material for solid-state cooling at low temperature.

It is still challenging to discover plastically deformable inorganic semiconductors. Here, the authors report a high-throughput screening of tens of potential 2D van der Waals crystals that can deform plastically accompanied with experimental verification.

We synthesized small-sized ion doped PEDOT-Ag quantum dot (S-PEDOT-Ag QD) composite film via one-step vapor phase polymerization (VPP) using a novel Ag(I) salt precursor. The films exhibit enhanced thermoelectric performance and good antibacterial activity at low Ag loadings. This facile approach provides new route to synthesize high performance conducting polymer–inorganic composite.

Long-term service stability of thermoelectric devices is one of the major obstacles for their application. Here, the authors combine interfacial reaction energy and Sb migration activation energy barrier as a criterion to determine the interfacial reliability for skutterudite thermoelectric devices.

Cyclic polymers can be usually accessed by ring-expansion and ring-closure approaches. Here, the authors report an alternative blocking-cyclization technique which enables the tunable synthesis of multicyclic polymers via commercial Ru-based Grubbs catalysts and conventional ring-opening metathesis polymerisation.

Integrating inventory data with machine learning models reveals the global composition of tree types—needle-leaved evergreen individuals dominate, followed by broadleaved evergreen and deciduous trees—and climate change risks.

Methane emissions are determined by the balance of microbial methane production relative to consumption. Warming drives larger increases in methane production than consumption in experimental ponds, suggesting that natural ecosystems may represent a positive feedback under climate change.

The adaptor protein zyxin is known for its mechanosensing function in the maintenance of actin network. Here the authors show that zyxin is key to blood homeostasis and thrombosis by controlling the endothelial release of von Willebrand factor and the formation of actin scaffolds on exocytic granules.

Gong et al. uncover a role for the Golgi network in ER-associated endosome fission, showing that a Golgi-derived SEC14L2 compartment mediates ER-associated endosome fission by promoting PtdIns4P to PtdIns3P conversion.

A symbiont-free and chromosome-level genome of Pyropia haitanensis and the corresponding metagenome revealed insights into horizontally transferred genes and bacterial symbionts helping this intertidal algae to combat stress.

Micron-thick highly conductive poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) films are fabricated using a novel self-inhibited polymerization (SIP) approach. The newly adopted inhibitor-free heavy oxidative solutions containing weakly basic anions (WBAs) such as dodecylbenzenesulfonate (DBSA) enables the spin-coating of thick and homogeneous oxidant layer, and meanwhile effectively inhibits both the crystallization of the oxidant and the H⁺ formation throughout the polymerization process.