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EnvironmentSeptember 29, 2026

Rainfall extremes drive cocoa yield losses across the tropics.

There is a growing need for human-centered weather and climate forecasts that provide actionable information to farmers and other stakeholders. Cocoa, which sustains the livelihoods of nearly six million smallholder farmers, illustrates this need: Recent production shortfalls have threatened incomes, yet their underlying causes remain unclear, with explanations invoking both climatic and nonclimatic factors. Here we show that heavy rainfall, rather than temperature or mean water availability, is

Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 29, 2026

Plant fiber exploitation contributed to the emergence of ground-edged cutting tools in North China.

Ground-edged cutting tools are widely regarded as technological hallmarks of early agriculture in North China, commonly hypothesized to have been developed primarily for cereal harvesting. Yet the functional foundations of this innovation remain insufficiently tested. This study integrates use-wear and microfossil analyses of 140 stone tools from the Peiligang site, with experimental data, to reassess their roles within long-term trajectories of technological change from the Late Paleolithic to

Society & CultureSeptember 29, 2026

Global greenhouse gas cobenefits of US irrigated agriculture.

Land use and land conversion for agriculture contribute nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making the sector a key priority for emissions reductions. Crop yields are one factor that modulate agricultural land demand, with, all else equal, global land use change increasing with yield declines and decreasing with yield gains. Therefore, agricultural practices drive both direct, on-farm emissions, and indirect land use change emissions through yield effects. Here, we couple

EnvironmentSeptember 29, 2026

Manure to insect farming for feed mitigates nitrogen and greenhouse gas emissions.

Livestock manure is nutrient-rich and represents a promising feedstock for insect farming, with insect protein offering a high-quality alternative to conventional crop-based livestock feed. This pathway has substantial potential to mitigate nitrogen (N) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock systems. Here, we integrate global livestock models with trade, land-use, and cost-benefit analysis to quantify the environmental and economic implications of manure-to-insect conversion while ens

EnvironmentSeptember 29, 2026

Air pollution after the shutdown of US embassy monitoring.

For more than a decade, US embassies and consulates provided independent, publicly accessible air-quality information in cities worldwide. In 2025, this program was abruptly suspended, generating sharp drops in the availability of trusted pollution information. We evaluate the consequences of this change using real-time satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD) and a matched difference-in-differences design with same-country control cities. Across 46 cities, we find no systematic trends prio

Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 28, 2026

Neural network-augmented Pfaffian wave-functions for scalable simulations of interacting fermions.

Developing accurate numerical methods for strongly interacting fermions is crucial for improving our understanding of various quantum many-body phenomena, especially unconventional superconductivity. Recently, neural quantum states have emerged as a promising approach for studying correlated fermions, highlighted by the hidden fermion and backflow methods, which use neural networks to model corrections to fermionic quasiparticle orbitals. In this work, we expand these ideas to the space of Pfaff

Health & MedicineSeptember 28, 2026

PLASTID ENVELOPE ION CHANNELS (PEC1/2) link Ca 2+ and jasmonic acid signaling in plant cells.

Plants constantly encounter adverse environmental interactions. One organelle is particularly specialized in stress signaling and phytohormone synthesis: the plastid. Calcium (Ca 2+ ), a key second messenger, is known to intersect with cellular phytohormone signaling networks. While cytosolic Ca 2+ dynamics have been studied extensively, the physiological relevance of stromal Ca 2+ transients and the identity of channels mediating rapid Ca 2+ flux into plastids remain largely unexplored. In this

Health & MedicineSeptember 28, 2026

Structural insights into fosfomycin efflux by a streptococcal ABC transporter.

Gram-positive bacteria encode a broad array of ABC transporters that mediate substrate translocation across the cell membrane, with some contributing to their survival under environmental stresses such as antimicrobial exposure. While several of these transporters have been shown to exhibit multidrug efflux activity, the functional roles of many others remain unknown. Here, using an efflux pump screen in the opportunistic human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae , we identified a previously uncha

Physical/TechSeptember 28, 2026

Multiband condensate of magnons in two dimensions.

Wavelike bosonic particles can accumulate in a single mode characterized by a particular wavelength, and such condensates are at the heart of phenomena such as superconductivity and superfluidity where usually a single complex number describes their state. If there are several flavors of excitations or particles, a vector containing several complex numbers can characterize multicomponent condensation, thus opening new possibilities for textures, dynamics, and devices. Thus far, multicomponent co

Society & CultureSeptember 27, 2026

Cerebellar microcircuits enable robust evidence-based decisions through cortico-cerebellar coupling.

The cerebellum is increasingly implicated in perceptual decision-making, yet it remains unclear how the cerebellar cortex can support sparse evidence accumulation over behavioral time scales without assuming cortical-style dense local excitatory recurrence. We present a biologically constrained modeling framework showing that cerebellar microcircuits can implement graded accumulation and competition in the absence of such recurrence. In our model, type-II Purkinje-neuron excitability generates f

Physical/TechSeptember 27, 2026

Indirect reciprocity with dual private assessment.

People often cooperate out of concern for their reputation. The corresponding theory of indirect reciprocity predicts that such cooperation can only evolve if people's opinions of each other are sufficiently correlated. This correlation, however, can be difficult to achieve when individuals form their opinions independently from one another, as in private assessment models. In that case, errors can generate disagreements that propagate throughout a population. Here, we identify a simple mechanis

Health & MedicineSeptember 26, 2026

Detection of "hidden" mitotic crossovers by long-read DNA sequencing.

Mitotic crossovers in diploid organisms are usually detected by looking for loss of heterozygosity (LOH) for a marker. Assuming the crossover occurs between two duplicated chromatids, a single reciprocal crossover will result in two recombinant chromatids and two nonrecombinant chromatids. LOH will only be observed when a recombinant chromatid cosegregates with a nonrecombinant chromatid. Cells containing both recombinant chromosomes will not result in LOH. Below, we use long-range DNA sequencin

Health & MedicineSeptember 26, 2026

Amino acid homeostasis by CORVET/HOPS: A metabolic and stress resilience checkpoint for T cells.

Amino acid sufficiency is critical for T cell metabolic reprogramming, yet how T cells maintain amino acid homeostasis remains poorly defined. Here, we identify the CORVET and HOPS (CORVET/HOPS) tethering complexes as essential upstream regulators. In activated T cells, they sustain intracellular amino acid levels by promoting macropinocytosis to acquire extracellular nutrients. This function enables dual signaling outcomes: suppression of the integrated stress response (ISR) and activation of m

Physical/TechSeptember 26, 2026

A genetic program for rapid initiation of axillary meristems at the onset of flowering.

Shoot branching patterns and their diversity arise from variable activities of axillary meristems (AMs). A common feature of flowering plants is delayed AM initiation and growth during the vegetative phase, followed by a sudden and rapid acceleration of apical AM initiation during the reproductive phase. The mechanisms underlying this pronounced developmental shift are poorly understood. During tomato floral transition, the primary shoot meristem (PSM) terminates in a flower after producing two

Physical/TechSeptember 26, 2026

David Botstein: A pioneering geneticist and educator 1942-2026.

David Botstein, who died on February 27, 2026, was a towering figure in the field of modern molecular genetics. His research career was largely focused on the development of methods to better understand biological systems, beginning with his early work on Salmonella phage P22 and yeast, where he exploited the use of conditional lethal mutations as suppressors to identify genes with common functions and to order them in a pathway. He is best remembered for developing restriction fragment length p

Physical/TechSeptember 26, 2026

Ultra-narrowband organic room-temperature phosphorescence achieved by boosting low-frequency vibronic coupling.

We pioneered a strategy based on low-frequency vibronic coupling to design narrowband room-temperature phosphorescent (RTP) materials. Here we select coronene derivative (CoDe) system and report that attaching aroyl group to the coronene core disrupts its intrinsic symmetry and introduces abundant low-frequency vibrational modes, thereby affording efficient room-temperature phosphorescence with a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of approximately 25 nm or narrower. In CoDe systems functionalized

Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 26, 2026

Why friends in common reveal network stars.

The Friendship Paradox states that, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. We extend this to common friends-those who appear in multiple people's friend lists. We show that the more people who share a common friend, the more connected that person tends to be, and we derive an expression quantifying this progression. In a regional Facebook network, a common friend to three randomly sampled individuals has on average more friends than 99.9% of the network. In a citation network, a

Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 26, 2026

Sensory context improves language prediction in humans and LLMs.

Language is a fundamental human capacity. Large language models (LLMs) have presented the first viable model of language outside of humans, yet how these models learn and use language differs significantly from humans. Here, we compare LLMs and humans predicting language with varying levels of sensory information-from disembodied written text to audiovisual videos of speakers-to demonstrate that, in both humans and LLMs, sensory context is critical for optimal performance. We asked human partici

Health & MedicineSeptember 25, 2026

Bright monomeric fluorescent protein elite-niRFP704 for two-channel near-infrared STED nanoscopy.

The near-infrared (NIR) spectral region is attractive for live-cell imaging, due to low autofluorescence and reduced phototoxicity. Some phytochrome-derived fluorescent proteins absorb and emit fluorescence in the NIR, but have short fluorescence lifetimes and relatively low quantum yields, requiring higher laser powers thus limiting their usefulness for live-cell superresolution microscopy. Using the bacterial phytochrome miRFP703 as a template, we screened for variants with longer fluorescence

Health & MedicineSeptember 25, 2026

Quantitative nanoscale imaging shows peptide-MHC I complexes are monomeric and spatially regulated in human dendritic cells.

Major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC I) molecules present antigenic peptides to cytotoxic T cells, a process central to immune surveillance. However, the nanoscale spatial organization of peptide-MHC I (pMHC I) on human dendritic cells (DCs), key initiators of cytotoxic T cell responses, remains largely unexplored. Here, we combine high-affinity soluble T cell receptors with DNA-based point accumulation for imaging in nanoscale topography (DNA-PAINT) to quantitatively map and count defi

Health & MedicineSeptember 25, 2026

Cannabinoid tolerance relies on CB 1 receptor ubiquitination by NEDD4L.

Cannabinoids, the active components of cannabis, exert numerous acute effects in the brain by engaging cannabinoid CB 1 receptors (CB 1 Rs). However, tolerance emerges rapidly after repeated drug exposure, undermining the efficacy of cannabinoid-based therapies and contributing to cannabis-associated adverse effects. Although the processes of CB 1 R short-term desensitization (i.e., receptor uncoupling and internalization) are well characterized, the mechanisms underlying CB 1 R long-term tolera

Health & MedicineSeptember 25, 2026

A gut symbiotic filamentous fungus reprograms host metabolism and the microbiota to confer radioprotection.

The gut mycobiome is increasingly linked to host physiology, yet functional insights are dominated by yeasts, leaving the roles of filamentous fungi largely unexplored. Here, we identify Mucor racemosus as a gut-resident symbiotic filamentous fungus that establishes intestinal colonization via both hyphal and spore forms. M. racemosus confers radioprotection through an integrated metabolic program coupling direct host support with microbiota-mediated amplification. The fungus produces L-glutamat

Society & CultureSeptember 25, 2026

Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease and related dementias are typically described at two levels: the accumulation of molecular pathology and the emergence of cognitive impairment. Understanding the relationship between pathology, often studied in animal models, and human cognition will require measurements spanning intermediate scales, including single neurons, neuronal populations, and distributed networks. Here we combine longitudinal measurements of behavior and neuronal population activity with fluid and hi

Physical/TechSeptember 25, 2026

Multidomain interaction governs the filamentous assembly of the dominant-negative DNMT3A R882H mutant.

DNA methyltransferase DNMT3A-mediated de novo DNA methylation is important for proper regulation of gene expression and genomic stability in development. The DNMT3A R882H (DNMT3A R882H ) mutation, a hot-spot mutation in acute myeloid leukemia and developmental disorders, exerts a dominant-negative effect in DNMT3A-mediated DNA methylation through promoting high-order protein assembly. However, due to the lack of structural knowledge on DNMT3A homo-oligomers, the mechanism behind wild-type DNMT3A

EnvironmentSeptember 22, 2026

Earthquake-triggered cascading hazards under Arctic amplification.

Arctic warming is reshaping permafrost and glacierized terrains, potentially changing their natural hazards in response to seismic shaking. On 10 March 2025, a Mw 6.5 oceanic transform fault earthquake near Jan Mayen Island in the Arctic Ocean triggered a large rock avalanche that buried part of the Kjerulf Glacier, generating infrasound signals and glacier calving. Using seismic, Global Navigation Satellite System data, infrasound records, satellite imagery, and long-term climatological records

Society & CultureSeptember 22, 2026

Deconstruction of lysergic acid diethylamide.

Of the classic psychedelics, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is perhaps the best-known, but its complex chemical architecture has limited synthetic investigations aimed at generating analogues with improved safety and efficacy profiles. Here, we systematically deconstruct the tetracyclic ergoline core of LSD to create 9 simplified ergoline analogues (i.e., ergologs) and evaluate them in pharmacological assays relevant to 5-HT2A, 5-HT2B, and 5-HT2C receptor function. Our work revealed the key mo

EnvironmentSeptember 22, 2026

At least a fivefold gap in effective global marine protection.

The Convention on Biological Diversity's ambitious target to "effectively conserve" 30% of the world's oceans in protected areas by 2030 risks being undermined by a primary focus on total area protected rather than realized conservation outcomes. Area-based assessments can overstate success because few marine protected areas (MPAs) possess strong restrictions and high compliance. Here, we estimate the extent that conservation outcomes are realized across the global MPA network for shallow reefs

Health & MedicineSeptember 22, 2026

Why did some viruses evolve to be giants while others did not?

Viruses are ubiquitous mobile genetic elements that are obligate symbionts of cellular life forms and replicate exclusively within host cells. The current taxonomy of viruses includes 10 realms (the top rank taxon), 8 of which have small genomes in the range of one to about 60 kilobases and commensurately small virions. However, the two realms of viruses with double-stranded DNA genomes, Varidnaviria and Duplodnaviria , include several groups of viruses known as giant viruses, with genomes reach

EnvironmentSeptember 22, 2026

Visible light leaves evaporation and interfacial structure of neat water unchanged at the air-water interface.

Visible light-induced "photomolecular" enhancement of water evaporation has been proposed as a fundamentally new mode of light-matter interaction at aqueous interfaces, with far-reaching implications for climate processes and light-driven water technologies. Yet, the response of neat interfacial water to visible photons has not been directly quantified at both macroscopic and molecular scales. Here, we combine high-precision confocal displacement measurements with a surface-specific vibrational

Health & MedicineSeptember 21, 2026

YBX1 regulates RNA polymerase III transcripts to prevent inflammation.

Tolerance of endogenous nucleic acids is crucial for cellular homeostasis and when perturbed can lead to immune dysregulation. RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) bind, modify, and compartmentalize endogenous RNAs to prevent their recognition by the innate immune system. We found that loss of a highly abundant RBP, the cold shock domain containing Y-box binding protein 1 (YBX1), results in the spontaneous induction of an IL6/STAT3 inflammatory response and the upregulation of interferon-stimulated genes

Physical/TechSeptember 21, 2026

Advances in small area population estimation in the absence of national census data.

Population data at small area scales are essential for effective decision-making, influencing public health, disaster response, and resource allocation, among others. While national censuses remain the cornerstone of population data, they are often constrained by high costs, infrequent collection cycles, and coverage gaps, which can hinder timely data availability. To address these challenges, geospatial statistical approaches using limited microcensus surveys have been demonstrated as a reliabl

EnvironmentSeptember 21, 2026

Co-option of ancestral stem regulators drove recurrent evolution of underground storage organs.

Geophytes are plants that produce underground storage organs such as tubers, rhizomes, and bulbs, to facilitate asexual reproduction and withstand a myriad of environmental challenges. While the potato ( Solanum tuberosum L.) serves as the primary model for studying tuberization, the genetic mechanisms encoding this trait across diverse angiosperm lineages remains unclear. This study utilized a phylogenomic-transcriptomic approach to compare tuber development across nine tuberizing species with

Health & MedicineSeptember 21, 2026

Profile of C. Robin Buell.

C. Robin Buell has been a leading figure in plant genomics since the advent of DNA sequencing technology. She helped lead multiple consortia to sequence some of the first crop genomes at the turn of the millennium. She has since used the genomes to tackle questions in fundamental biology, plant evolution, and agriculture. Recently, she applied single-cell technologies to uncover how complex biosynthetic pathways are compartmentalized across different rare plant cell types. Now at the University

EnvironmentSeptember 15, 2026

The genomic origins and evolutionary path to a key innovation in the world's most venomous snakes.

Evolutionary innovation is a catalyst for the colonization of new environments and the adaptive radiations of major groups. Novel traits typically evolve through the modification of preexisting characters, but the genetic paths underlying their origin have been challenging to trace, and the general requirements for and relative order of different kinds of gene mutations have been difficult to assess. Here, we trace the genomic origins of four procoagulant venom toxins (factor X, factor V, group

Health & MedicineSeptember 15, 2026

One mechanism, two diseases: Involvement of enzyme-substrate complexes in the pathogenesis of celiac disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

Celiac disease (CeD) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) share several key features. In both diseases HLA class II allotypes are the major genetic determinants, in both diseases there are antibodies to posttranslationally modified peptides (i.e., deamidated peptides in CeD and citrullinated peptides in RA) and in both diseases there are autoantibodies to enzymes that mediate these peptide modifications (i.e., transglutaminase 2 for CeD and peptidyl arginine deiminase 2 and 4 for RA). In CeD, recent in

Health & MedicineSeptember 15, 2026

Peptides adopt stable omega-loop structures in concentrated sulfuric acid.

The search for life beyond Earth has focused on planets and moons with liquid water, reflecting the assumption that complex biomolecules require aqueous environments to remain stable and functional. Such a view excludes a wide class of planetary settings, including the concentrated sulfuric acid clouds of Venus, where extreme acidity and minimal water are thought to preclude molecular structure despite suitable temperatures. A growing body of evidence shows that a wide range of organic molecules

Health & MedicineSeptember 15, 2026

Integrative modeling of the genome structure and dynamics in fission yeast.

Genome organization in the nucleus is highly structured and dynamic. Recent advances in genomic technology have enabled the measurement of genome-wide architecture and locus-specific motion, yielding contact maps and live-cell trajectories. However, these outcomes are derived from different modalities and are not directly comparable, with their quantitative integration being a key challenge. Here we establish a genome-wide live-cell imaging platform in fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe , t

Society & CultureSeptember 15, 2026

A role for self-regulatory control in the absence of ingroup preference.

One of psychology's most ubiquitous findings is that of robust ingroup preference, an explicitly stated human preference for the groups to which we belong. The advent of implicit measures of social cognition introduced a paradoxical result: Compared to members of higher-status groups, members of lower-status groups often show no implicit ingroup preference, sometimes even showing outgroup preference, a result rarely observed on explicit measures. Prevailing theories have provided macro-level acc

EnvironmentSeptember 15, 2026

Programming sequential deployment of origami via kinematic transition fronts.

Propagating transition fronts, in which local interactions sequentially trigger state changes, are widely observed across natural, biological, and engineered systems. While such propagation has been engineered using energy-driven instabilities, front propagation governed purely by geometric constraints remains underexplored and lacks a general design framework. In particular, how to program sequential deployment in origami through such kinematic propagation remains an open challenge. Here, we de

EnvironmentSeptember 15, 2026

End-functionalized ions promote stability of highly frustrated phases in diblock copolymers.

Block copolymers self-assemble into ordered nanostructures whose geometry is governed by a competition between interfacial energy and chain conformational entropy. While this competition produces a rich sequence of morphologies, topologically complex "frustrated" phases, such as the primitive cubic network and single networks, incur severe packing penalties and are difficult to access in neutral systems. Here we show that ions functionalized at the termini of one block in an AB diblock copolymer