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Three electron microscopy datasets are combined to provide a complete connectomic description of the neural circuitry that makes up the neck connective in Drosophila, including the descending neurons, ascending neurons and sensory ascending neurons.

Standard approaches for identifying pleiotropic genetic variants may lead to spurious results. Here the authors present a new statistical method and show that it uncovers five genes linked to metabolites in METSIM participants, which were previously undetected by existing methods.

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.

The synthesis of atom-thin amorphous films remains challenging as their thermodynamically favourable grains are neither two dimensional nor layered. Here a droplet-driven nanoribbon-to-film growth strategy is reported to achieve amorphous metal chalcogenides at the single-layer limit.

A variational-autoencoder-based diffusion architecture that enables topological controls on the diffusion-based protein structure generation is proposed. As a result, novel folds of mainly beta proteins can be designed with experimental validation.

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.

Complete sequences of chromosomes telomere-to-telomere from chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan and siamang provide a comprehensive and valuable resource for future evolutionary comparisons.

The authors report their observation of the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in rhombohedral hexalayer graphene/hBN moiré superlattice devices.

The instability of quantum dot inks hinders the scaling up of colloidal quantum dot electronics. Now, Shi and team stabilize the inks with an iodine-rich environment in a weakly coordinating solvent, achieving 13.4% in small-area solar cells and over 10% in modules.

A miniaturized and low-power-consumption system is designed to allow the accurate sensing and wireless transmission of internal temperature and strain signals inside lithium-ion batteries with negligible influence on their performance, improving their safety.

Fracture behaviours in multilayer h-BN, involving interlayer-friction toughening and edge-reconstruction embrittlement, are identified through in situ experiments and theoretical analyses.

The death of massive stars has traditionally been discovered by explosive events in the gamma-ray band. Liu et al. show that the sensitive wide-field monitor on board Einstein Probe can reveal a weak soft-X-ray signal much earlier than gamma rays.

Catenanes can exhibit chirality even when their component rings are achiral. Here an isostructural desymmetrization strategy is developed, demonstrating that two achiral rings, each featuring two mirror planes and a two-fold axis of symmetry, can form a catenane with tuneable mechanical chirality.

Achieving both high activity and selectivity in CH₄ photooxidation to C₂₊ hydrocarbons is challenging. This work shows that integrating photochemical and photothermal effects enhances both, enabling efficient CH₄ oxidative coupling to C₂₊ alkanes.

X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy has been mainly used to measure slow dynamics using synchrotron sources. Here the authors demonstrate the split-and- delay pulse set-up to study nanosecond dynamics of gold nanoparticles using XPCS with free electron laser pulses.

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.

Spin injection in pure topological surface states of topological insulators is challenging due to the coexistence of highly conducting bulk states. Here, Song et al. report spin injection and inverse Edelstein effect in the spin–momentum locked surface states of topological Kondo insulator SmB₆.

Diffraction-before-destruction of ultrashort X-ray pulses can visualize non-equilibrium processes at the nanoscale with sub-femtosecond precision. Here, the authors demonstrate how the brightness and the spatial resolution of such snapshots can be substantially increased despite ionization.

Deformation twinning, a key deformation mechanism that is rarely explored in superhard materials, is shown to be activated in cubic boron nitride and other cubic covalent materials under a loading-specific twinning criterion.

High-throughput computational screening of multicomponent molecular photocatalytic systems offers a strategy to minimize the screening of large numbers of photosensitizer–catalyst combinations. Here a machine learning-accelerated approach using multiple descriptors shows strong predictive power in experimentally validated systems for CO₂ reduction.

Genomic profiling of tumours can help tailer treatments to the patient, however, it often fails to accurately predict therapeutic outcomes. Here, the authors combine molecular and functional characterisation via BH3 profiling to identify therapeutically targetable vulnerabilities in glioma.

The conventional approach with applying self-assembled monolayer suffers from limited interface coverage and weaker dipole interactions. Here, authors employ ferroelectric molecule to construct a dipole layer, achieving certified efficiency of 25.36% for inverted perovskite solar cells.

Magnetic skyrmions are potentially suitable for future spintronic devices, but their dynamical behaviour in real space remains elusive. Here, Wooet al. report nanosecond-dynamics of a 100nm-size magnetic skyrmion triggered by current-induced spin-orbit torques.

The interfaces in perovskite solar cells are critical to the device performance. Li et al. tune the bond strength of the interfacial molecule with the perovskite and the electron transport layer, increasing the power conversion efficiency of the cells.

Understanding and exploiting the redox properties of uranium is of great importance but stabilizing both low and high valent uranium ions in a preserved ligand environment remains challenging. Here, the authors report the synthesis and characterisation of a series of uranium(II–VI) complexes supported by a tripodal tris(amido)arene ligand.

Individual layers of FeSe grown on SrTiO3 superconduct at far higher temperatures than in bulk, but the effect of the film-substrate interface is poorly understood. Peng et al. find that modifying this interface has a significant non-trivial effect on the superconducting characteristics of FeSe films.

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 popular genetically-encoded Ca²⁺ indicator, GCaMP, has several side-effects. Here the authors show that GCaMP containing CaM interferes with gating and signaling of L-type calcium channels, which disrupts Ca²⁺ dynamics and gene expression, and develop GCaMP-X to overcome these limitations.

Lilies are perennial plants with ornamental flowers and large genomes. The authors assemble genomes of two Liliales species, analyze lily phylogeny, flower and stem development (bulbs in lilies, rhizomes in flame lilies), bulb growth transitions, and colchicine biosynthesis.

6R-TaS2 is a natural van der Waals heterostructure formed by 1H- and 1T-phase TaS₂ layers, which can individually exhibit Ising superconductivity, correlated states and charge density waves. Here, the authors show experimental evidence of emergent nematic Ising superconductivity with simultaneous hidden magnetism (extrinsic anomalous Hall effect and Kondo screening) in 6R-TaS₂ under 30 K.

Accurately predicting how much rising atmospheric carbon dioxide can increase rice production is important for managing global rice production. This study highlights that elevated carbon dioxide will boost rice yields more in middle-to-high-income countries than in low-income countries, and that this yield gap will continue to widen in the future.

A Type II Weyl fermion semimetal has been predicted in Mo_xW_1−xTe₂, but it awaits experimental evidence. Here, Belopolski et al. observe a topological Fermi arc in Mo_xW_1−xTe₂, showing it originates from a Type II Weyl fermion and offering a new platform to study novel transport phenomena in Weyl semimetals.

Beta-relaxation in glasses is commonly attributed to the confined motions of constituent atoms in nanosized domains, but there is no direct evidence so far. Here, Zhu et al. show the correlation between the evolution of spatial heterogeneity at nanoscale and beta-relaxation below glass transition point.

The formation of organelles was a pivotal point in eukaryotic evolution. Here they show that Archaea possess Arf-like GTPases that can perform key organelle-producing mechanisms when expressed in a eukaryotic cell, laying the foundation for the evolution of endomembrane organelles.

The collective-flow-assisted nuclear shape-imaging method images the nuclear global shape by colliding them at ultrarelativistic speeds and analysing the collective response of outgoing debris.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

Left- and right-handed snub cubes show photocontrollable elasticity and hardness, in addition to the ability to encapsulate different small molecules in distinct compartments simultaneously, with potential applications in the development of advanced biomimetic materials.

The coexistence of topological and superconducting states in a single layer of FeSe on a SrTiO₃ substrate is reported.

Avoidance tactics.

The authors present SVclone, a computational method for inferring the cancer cell fraction of structural variants from whole-genome sequencing data.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

Spin-orbit torques, arising in systems with strong spin-orbit interactions, have been a major avenue of research for the potential electric control of magnetization. Recently, unconventional spin-orbit torques, with spin polarizations aligned in atypical ways have garnered interest due to the numerous advantages offered compared to their conventional counterparts. Here, Xue et al investigate ‘type-x’ spin-orbit torque switching, demonstrating both unique spin polarizations, and field-free magnetization switching in Platinum/Cobalt multilayers.

Oxygen redox in transition metal oxides enhances the energy content of Na-ion batteries but is typically plagued by poor reversibility. Here, the authors achieve non-hysteresis through the formation of a spin singlet state to stabilize the active oxygen redox reaction in P3-type Na_2/3Cu_1/3Mn_2/3O₂.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

Zeolites are porous aluminosilicate molecular sieves with uniform pores of molecular dimensions that have a wide range of applications. Here authors use machine learning to guide zeolite synthesis and predict the structure and properties of faujasite zeolites from synthesis conditions.

A pan-cancer genomic analysis reports the effects of structural variations on chromatin domains (TADs). Most TAD disruptions do not result in appreciable changes in expression of nearby genes.