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By analyzing President Trump’s tweets and data from two media sources, the authors provide evidence suggesting that when the media reports on a topic potentially harmful to the president, he tweets about unrelated issues. Further evidence from this case study suggests that these diversionary tweets may also successfully reduce subsequent media coverage of the harmful topic.

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.

Posterior scleral birefringence, measured by triple-input polarization-sensitive optical coherence, predicts the onset of myopia in guinea pigs and is associated with myopia status in patients.

Antibiotic resistance can be addressed by reinventing classes of antibiotics through chemical synthesis. Here BT-33—a fully synthetic antibiotic—affords broad-spectrum activity against the bacterial ribosome. X-ray crystallography, theoretical calculations and structure–activity relationship studies reveal the structural features that contribute to the enhanced antibacterial activity and metabolic stability of BT-33.

Analysis of data on six stable crops, capturing two-thirds of global crop calories, allows estimation of agricultural impacts and the potential of global producer adaptations to reduce output losses owing to climate change.

In this work, the authors probe the efficacy of BWC0977, a bacterial topoisomerase inhibitor, in pre-clinical animal models, also demonstrating that BWC0977 is safe and well tolerated in healthy human volunteers, in a phase 1 trial.

Here the authors induce asymmetric transmission in planar Fabry–Pérot microcavities by embedding organic thin films exhibiting apparent circular dichroism (ACD), an optical phenomenon based on 2D chirality.

A genome-wide study by the Long COVID Host Genetics Initiative identifies an association between the FOXP4 locus and long COVID, implicating altered lung function in its pathophysiology.

Extracellular vesicles have been implicated in the transmission of pathogens from the arthropod to the human host. Here the authors show that tick-derived extracellular vesicles play a role in feeding and modulate the outcome of bacterial infection.

A tethered macrocyclic peptide antibiotic class described here—which shows potent antibacterial activity against carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii—blocks the transport of bacterial lipopolysaccharide from the inner membrane to its destination on the outer membrane through inhibition of the LptB₂FGC complex.

A major challenge in protein design is to augment existing functional proteins with multiple property enhancements. Here the authors use the evolutionary model EVcouplings to computationally design highly mutated variants of TEM-1 ß-lactamase, and characterise these designs experimentally.

IL-36 receptor is crucial for host defense and tissue repair. Here, the authors describe identification and characterization of low molecular weight inhibitors of the IL-36 receptor using encoded library technologies. This represents a rare example of small molecules inhibiting a member of IL-1 receptor family.

Bacterial resistance to sulfonamide antibiotics (sulfas) is mediated by acquisition of sul genes, which encode sulfa-insensitive versions of the target enzyme, dihydropteroate synthase. Here, Venkatesan et al. study Sul enzymes using biochemical, structural, mutational and functional analyses, revealing the molecular basis for Sul-mediated drug resistance.

Discovery of a bicyclic peptide inhibitor of cell wall biosynthesis in the Enterobacterales demonstrates applicability of a modified phage display platform to antibiotic discovery and development.

Salmonella Typhimurium replicates within host phagocytes. Here, the authors show that a known psychoactive drug (metergoline) inhibits growth of the pathogen in macrophages, disrupts the proton motive force at the bacterial cytoplasmic membrane, and extends animal survival during systemic infection.

Due to recent developments in steady-state and ultrafast spectroscopic techniques there are more readily available methods to excite and observe anisotropic low-dimensional materials in transient states using light-matter interactions. Here, the authors observe photoinduced metal-insulator transitions in a quasi-one-dimensional metal, and analyse the role of d-d excitonic excitations in the transient state.

Bacterial Rhs proteins constitute a diverse family of secreted toxins. Here, the authors present a cryo-electron microscopy structure of an Rhs protein from Pseudomonas aeruginosa and provide insights into the mechanisms by which the protein delivers its encapsulated pore-forming toxin fragment to the bacterial membrane.

A custom-made fidget spinner rapidly concentrates pathogens in 1-ml samples of undiluted urine by more than 100-fold for the on-device colorimetric detection of bacterial load and pathogen identification.

Resistive switching in metal oxides is related to the migration of donor defects. Here Baeumer et al. use in operandoX-ray spectromicroscopy to quantify the doping locally and show that small local variations in the donor concentration result in large variations in the device resistance.

This Review provides a comprehensive overview of fibroblast biology in rheumatoid arthritis and other chronic inflammatory diseases. The authors discuss insights into fibroblast behaviour and pathogenicity from single-cell and functional studies and describe how these findings have informed efforts to therapeutically target fibroblasts.

NMR resonances of backbone nuclei have been assigned for >95% of the residues in oxidized, substrate-free, perdeuterated ¹³C/¹⁵N-labelled MurB (347 residues). A novel approach utilizing minimum chemical shift changes was employed to localize the NADP⁺ binding site on MurB.

Phylogenomic analysis of 7,923 angiosperm species using a standardized set of 353 nuclear genes produced an angiosperm tree of life dated with 200 fossil calibrations, providing key insights into evolutionary relationships and diversification.

The involvement of cell death pathways in the early stage of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) development, especially KRAS-dependent acinar-to-ductal metaplasia (ADM), remains to be investigated. Here, the authors find that TAK1 mediates cell survival during ADM transdifferentiation through suppression of apoptosis and necroptosis, which could be targeted for prevention and treatment of PDAC.

MethyLYZR, an epigenetic classifier of brain tumors, provides clinically relevant cancer classification results within 15 min of sequencing, with potential applications for neurosurgical intraoperative use.

Synthetic biologists have the know-how and ambition to retool whole genomes. But the hidden complexity of biological systems continues to surprise them.

The glycopeptide antibiotic-related compounds complestatin and corbomycin function by binding to peptidoglycan and blocking the action of autolysins—peptidoglycan hydrolase enzymes that remodel the cell wall during growth.

Type IIA topoisomerases (topo2As) create transient double-strand DNA breaks. Here, the authors report structures showing how QPT-1 binds in the DNA/topo2A complex at the same site as the fluoroquinolone moxifloxacin, and discuss the potential for developing new classes of antibiotics.