The Sikkim flood of October 2023: Drivers, causes and impacts of a multihazard cascade.

On 3 October 2023, a multihazard cascade in the Sikkim Himalaya, India, was triggered by 14.7 million m of frozen lateral moraine collapsing into South Lhonak Lake, generating an ~20 m tsunami-like impact wave, breaching the moraine, and draining ~50 million m of water. The ensuing Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) eroded ~270 million m of sediment, which overwhelmed infrastructure, including hydropower installations along the Teesta River.

Scratching more than an itch.

Enhanced antibacterial skin inflammation is an adaptation of the itch-scratch cycle.

Genome recombination on demand.

Large genome rearrangements in mammalian cells can be generated at scale.

Catching carbon fixation without fixing.

Structural snapshots of an enzyme complex reveal missing pieces of a biological process.

The time course and organization of hippocampal replay.

The mechanisms by which the brain replays neural activity sequences remain unknown. Recording from large ensembles of hippocampal place cells in freely behaving rats, we observed that replay content is strictly organized over multiple timescales and governed by self-avoidance. After movement cessation, replays avoided the animal's previous path for 3 seconds.

The monster in the room University of California Press, 2025. 336 pp.

A historian interrogates the mythical creatures we create to dehumanize and devalue others.

Pre-exposure antibody prophylaxis protects macaques from severe influenza.

Influenza virus pandemics and seasonal epidemics have claimed countless lives. Recurrent zoonotic spillovers of influenza viruses with pandemic potential underscore the need for effective countermeasures. In this study, we show that pre-exposure prophylaxis with broadly neutralizing antibody (bnAb) MEDI8852 is highly effective in protecting cynomolgus macaques from severe disease caused by aerosolized highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus infection.

Randomizing the human genome by engineering recombination between repeat elements.

We lack tools to edit DNA sequences at scales necessary to study 99% of the human genome that is noncoding. To address this gap, we applied CRISPR prime editing to insert recombination handles into repetitive sequences, up to 1697 per cell line, which enables generating large-scale deletions, inversions, translocations, and circular DNA. Recombinase induction produced more than 100 stochastic megabase-sized rearrangements in each cell.

Ancient genomics and the origin, dispersal, and development of domestic sheep.

The origins and prehistory of domestic sheep () are incompletely understood; to address this, we generated data from 118 ancient genomes spanning 12,000 years sampled from across Eurasia. Genomes from Central Türkiye ~8000 BCE are genetically proximal to the domestic origins of sheep but do not fully explain the ancestry of later populations, suggesting a mosaic of wild ancestries. Genomic signatures indicate selection by ancient herders for pigmentation patterns, hornedness, and growth rate.

Taking responsibility: Asilomar and its legacy.

A reappraisal of the constitutional position of science in American democracy is needed.

Invoking Asilomar.

The historic meeting's legacy resists simple lessons.

Transforming achiral semiconductors into chiral domains with exceptional circular dichroism.

Highly concentrated solutions of asymmetric semiconductor magic-sized clusters (MSCs) of cadmium sulfide, cadmium selenide, and cadmium telluride were directed through a controlled drying meniscus front, resulting in the formation of chiral MSC assemblies. This process aligned their transition dipole moments and produced chiroptic films with exceptionally strong circular dichroism. -factors reached magnitudes as high as 1.

Viewing Asilomar from the Global South.

To many in the scientific community, the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA stands as a singular achievement. This experiment in governance seemed to demonstrate that citizens could trust scientists to anticipate their fields' risks and propose sensible ways to regulate themselves. Over the past half-century, similar efforts have been made to govern controversial areas of research, from geoengineering to artificial intelligence.

Learning the language of life with AI.

In 2021, a year before ChatGPT took the world by storm amid the excitement about generative artificial intelligence (AI), AlphaFold 2 cracked the 50-year-old protein-folding problem, predicting three-dimensional (3D) structures for more than 200 million proteins from their amino acid sequences. This accomplishment was a precursor to an unprecedented burgeoning of large language models (LLMs) in the life sciences. That was just the beginning.

Hippocampal coding of identity, sex, hierarchy, and affiliation in a social group of wild fruit bats.

Social animals live in groups and interact volitionally in complex ways. However, little is known about neural responses under such natural conditions. Here, we investigated hippocampal CA1 neurons in a mixed-sex group of five to 10 freely behaving wild Egyptian fruit bats that lived continuously in a laboratory-based cave and formed a stable social network.

Multiplex generation and single-cell analysis of structural variants in mammalian genomes.

Studying the functional consequences of structural variants (SVs) in mammalian genomes is challenging because (i) SVs arise much less commonly than single-nucleotide variants or small indels and (ii) methods to generate, map, and characterize SVs in model systems are underdeveloped. To address these challenges, we developed Genome-Shuffle-seq, a method that enables the multiplex generation and mapping of thousands of SVs (deletions, inversions, translocations, and extrachromosomal circles) throughout mammalian genomes. We also demonstrate the co-capture of SV identity with single-cell transcriptomes, facilitating the measurement of SV impact on gene expression.

Scratching promotes allergic inflammation and host defense via neurogenic mast cell activation.

Itch is a dominant symptom in dermatitis, and scratching promotes cutaneous inflammation, thereby worsening disease. However, the mechanisms through which scratching exacerbates inflammation and whether scratching provides benefit to the host are largely unknown. We found that scratching was required for skin inflammation in mouse models dependent on FcεRI-mediated mast cell activation.

An "opinion reproduction number" for infodemics in a bounded-confidence content-spreading process on networks.

We study the spreading dynamics of content on networks. To do this, we use a model in which content spreads through a bounded-confidence mechanism. In a bounded-confidence model (BCM) of opinion dynamics, the agents of a network have continuous-valued opinions, which they adjust when they interact with agents whose opinions are sufficiently close to theirs.

Genetic diversity, population structure in a historical panel of Brazilian soybean cultivars.

Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merrill] is one of the most widely grown legumes in the world, with Brazil being its largest producer and exporter. Breeding programs in Brazil have resulted from multiple cycles of selection and recombination starting from a small number of USA cultivar ancestors in the 1950s and 1960s years.

First report of Gulupa baciliform virus A associated with passion fruit in China.

Passion fruit (Passiflora edulis) is a commercially important crop known for its nutritional value, high antioxidant content, and use in beverages and desserts. Gulupa baciliform virus A (GBVA), tentatively named Badnavirus in the family Caulimoviridae, is a cryptic circular double-stranded DNA (dsDNA, ≈6,951 bps) virus recently reported in Colombia with asymptomatic infection of passion fruit (Sepúlveda et al. 2022).

Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Perception of Health Literacy and Barriers to Care Among Cervical Stenosis Patients.

Study Design: Cross-Sectional Survey.

Objective: This study aimed to assess racial disparities in self-reported barriers to care, health literacy, and health status within a large cohort of cervical stenosis patients.

Methods: This cross-sectional study used ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes to identify cervical stenosis patients recorded in the NIH All of Us Research Program between 2017 and 2022.

G3BP1 ribonucleoprotein complexes regulate focal adhesion protein mobility and cell migration.

The subcellular localization of mRNAs plays a pivotal role in biological processes, including cell migration. For instance, β-actin mRNA and its associated RNA-binding protein (RBP), ZBP1/IGF2BP1, are recruited to focal adhesions (FAs) to support localized β-actin synthesis, crucial for cell migration. However, whether other mRNAs and RBPs also localize at FAs remains unclear.