2D electronics have lacked a strong p-type semiconductor. Wafer-scale monolayer boron carbon nitride fills the gap: its transistors reached a hole mobility of 100 cm2/Vs and an on-off ratio of 10^8, beyond current p-type 2D semiconductors. #ChemSky #semiconductors

Wafer-scale epitaxy growth of high-mobility p-type boron carbon nitride | Frontier

A long-standing bottleneck for two-dimensional (2D) CMOS technology, a form of complementary electronics, is the lack of high-performance p-type…

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A parts list for the plant mitochondrion: AtMitoCarta catalogs 1,609 mitochondrial proteins of Arabidopsis, 236 of them newly defined and 147 of unknown function, and finds that 15% of mitochondrial protein families are specific to plants. #PlantScience #plantsky

A high-confidence plant mitochondrial proteome via protein correlation profiling | Frontier

Plant mitochondria share many features with animal mitochondria but also have traits of their own, including both circular and linear mitochondrial DNA, RNA…

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Most grass pollen looks alike under an ordinary microscope. Deep learning on superresolution images picks up the differences: in a 25,000-year lake record from Mt. Kenya, grass diversity declined substantially 21,500 to 16,000 years ago, during the region's harshest ice-age cooling. #PlantScience

Deep learning of fossil pollen morphology reveals 25,000 y of ecological change in eastern African grasslands | Frontier

Grass pollen has been largely overlooked in studies of how grasslands evolved, because the pollen of most grass species cannot be told apart with…

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In a trial of 142,250 people aged 50 to 77 in England, 3 annual rounds of multicancer blood testing did not significantly lower stage III or IV diagnoses across 12 cancers (rate ratio 1.03). Secondary end point, stage IV: 0.86 (95% CI 0.74 to 1.00). @charlesswanton.bsky.social #MedSky

Effect of Screening with Multicancer Early-Detection Test on Late-Stage Cancer Diagnosis | Frontier

Whether screening with blood-based early-detection tests for multiple cancers, in addition to usual care, has clinical utility is unknown.

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Tracking 9,419 meals eaten by 173 stem cell transplant patients: sweets and sugars eaten during antibiotic treatment predicted worse gut microbiome disruption, with lower diversity and more Enterococcus. In mice, added sucrose increased and prolonged that bloom. #MicroSky

Sugar-rich foods exacerbate antibiotic-induced microbiome disruption | Frontier

Diet shapes the composition of the gut microbiota, but the specific effects of distinct food groups on microbiome dynamics are unclear, particularly under…

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A proof of concept for tracing AI-designed proteins: SynthIDBio embeds a watermark in protein sequences while keeping them functional. Watermarked binders bound their targets about as well as unmarked ones, and the mark was detected with near-perfect accuracy. @pushmeet.bsky.social #biosecurity

Function-preserving watermarking of AI-generated proteins | Frontier

Generative AI tools such as AlphaFold 3 and protein design models are accelerating advances in protein structure prediction and in the creation of new…

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Fat cells tune their lipid metabolism to the body clock, diet and temperature, and these signals meet at one mitochondrial transporter, SLC25A34: the clock represses it during sleep, while the active phase, lipid-rich diets or cold lift that repression. @zgerharthines.bsky.social #metabolism

Mitochondrial carrier SLC25A34 links clock, diet, and temperature control of adipocyte lipid cycling | Frontier

Lipid metabolism in fat cells (adipocytes) is coordinated by circadian rhythms, diet and environmental temperature, but how these diverse signals are…

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In a phase 3 trial of 2,339 non-diabetic adults with obesity, once-weekly retatrutide (a GIP, GLP-1 and glucagon receptor agonist) cut body weight by a mean of 25.0% at 12 mg over 80 weeks, vs 3.9% on placebo. It also reduced knee osteoarthritis pain and apnea-hypopnea events. #MedSky #obesity

Retatrutide, a Triple Hormone Receptor Agonist, for Treatment of Obesity | Frontier

Retatrutide activates the receptors for three hormones: glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide, glucagon-like peptide-1 and glucagon.

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From nematodes and zebrafish to macaques and humans, anesthesia leaves one signature: local neural activity runs on shorter timescales and synchrony between brain regions is dampened. Stimulating the macaque thalamus reversed it. @loopyluppi.bsky.social @misicbata.bsky.social #neuroskyence

Comprehensive profiling of brain dynamics during anesthesia across phylogeny | Frontier

The behavioral effects of anesthetics are highly conserved across species, hinting at shared, fundamental mechanisms.

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Evidence suggests small early bodies like Vesta had carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, yet their magmas should have outgassed them. In magma ocean-like mixtures, gas bubbles stick to metal droplets; under low gravity these compounds could sink and trap the elements inside. #planetaryscience #geology

Incorporation of atmospheric components in planetary magma oceans through bubble–metal compounds | Frontier

Carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen (atmophile elements) were thought to have accreted late during planetary formation, yet cosmochemical and astrophysical…

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Acanthamoeba castellanii causes infectious blindness. An inventory of its mitochondria lists 1,122 proteins, 381 without readily identifiable homologs in human or yeast mitochondria. Oxygen rewires their energy machinery, and the amoeba can make hydrogen gas without oxygen. #MicroSky #mitochondria

Mitochondrial proteome of Acanthamoeba delineates aerobic and anaerobic pathways dynamically regulated by oxygen | Frontier

Acanthamoeba castellanii, an amoeba that causes infectious blindness, sits in a key evolutionary outgroup to humans and fungi, and its divergent…

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Feeling competent can bias visual encoding like a reward. In these tasks, observers made more confident about some stimuli prioritized encoding them: better where already accurate, worse where not, and less accurate overall. @ivntmc.bsky.social @bayslab.org #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Intrinsic rewards guide visual resource allocation via reinforcement learning | Frontier

Humans and other animals prioritize the visual processing of stimuli that signal rewards, but research has focused on tangible incentives such as money or…

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Do tau strains keep their structure on transmission? Filaments from the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease or corticobasal degeneration, injected into wild-type mice, seeded mouse tau filaments with the same structures, as prion strains do. @sjorsscheres.bsky.social #neuroskyence #Alzheimers

Prion-like transmission of human tau strains in the mouse brain | Frontier

Most neurodegenerative diseases are thought to spread through the brain by prion-like mechanisms, in which filamentous protein assemblies self-propagate by…

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1,287 Andean hillforts (pukaras, a type mostly of 1250-1500 CE), found by satellite across 150,000+ km² and linked by intervisibility and walking cost: open terrain grew larger, looser defensive networks, rugged terrain smaller, tighter ones, broadly matching known political units. #archaeology

Defensive networks provide basis for late pre-Hispanic Andean polities | Frontier

Pukaras, hillforts that are very common in the Andean highlands, date overwhelmingly to 1250 to 1500 CE, reflecting a period of widespread concern with…

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8,619 mitochondrial proteins measured in eight organisms, mitoproteomes then predicted for ~200 eukaryotes: 33 protein families conserved in eukaryotic pathogens but absent in humans are candidate targets; eukaryotes' last common ancestor likely had a complex mitochondrion. #evolution #cellbiology

Comparative analysis of mitochondrial proteomes across the tree of life | Frontier

Mitochondria arose about 2 billion years ago from the endosymbiosis of a bacterium with an archaea-related host cell.

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Could AI compute run on sunlight in orbit? A design: solar-powered satellite fleets with TPU chips, free-space optical links and close formation flight. Radiation-tested Trillium TPUs survived a dose equal to a 5-year mission without permanent failures. @blaiseaguera.bsky.social et al. #DataCenters

Toward a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design | Frontier

The Sun is the largest energy source in the solar system, which the authors say warrants considering how future AI infrastructure could most efficiently tap…

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Nine preregistered experiments (N = 8,769): selfish people inflated their choice's social benefit, prosocial people talked theirs up too, and selfish distortions showed signs of contagion: others adopted them and became more selfish. @mariusvollberg.bsky.social, Jörg Gross #PsychSky

Selfish and prosocial individuals both distort their actions’ impact, but selfish distortions can be more contagious | Frontier

People often act without knowing exactly how their actions affect others. Across nine preregistered online experiments with 8,769 adults, predominantly US…

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Why do whole-sporozoite malaria vaccines protect so well? In rodent models, sterilizing immunity required the parasites to migrate through several host cells before infecting the liver. Without that, vaccination failed to induce protective liver-resident memory CD8 T cell responses. #malaria

Host cell traversal by Plasmodium parasites drives sterilizing T cell-mediated immunity following immunization | Frontier

Whole-organism malaria vaccines made from liver-infective sporozoites give high levels of sterile protection against pre-erythrocytic (liver-stage)…

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Stratego hides information on a massive scale, which kept top human play beyond AI. Ataraxos, built on new self-play RL and test-time search methods, beat the most decorated player ever by a large margin, on orders of magnitude less compute and data. @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social #MachineLearning

Scalable decision-making for games of imperfect information | Frontier

The authors introduce Ataraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego built on general techniques they developed for self-play reinforcement learning and for…

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Why does past stress make new stress hit harder? In mice, prior stress made the anterior hypothalamic nucleus more reactive. Inhibiting it blunted stress responses, and silencing its amygdala inputs abolished the sensitized ones. @zachtpennington.bsky.social @denisejcai.bsky.social #neuroskyence

An amygdala to anterior hypothalamic circuit gates stress sensitivity | Frontier

Using unbiased whole-brain activity mapping in mice, the authors looked for circuits that previous adversity remodels to heighten sensitivity to later stress.

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Do butterfly wings fool predators in flight? Films of take-offs, comparative analysis, simulated evolution and behavioural tests suggest high-contrast wing patterns and flight together create illusory motion cues that confuse predators. @grahancock.bsky.social @jtroscianko.bsky.social #butterflies

Butterfly wing patterns in flight create powerful illusory motion cues | Frontier

The authors propose that butterflies' high-contrast wing patterns work together with their flight to create visual illusions that confuse predators, and…

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Organic matter in primitive carbonaceous meteorites appears to carry oxygen from the early solar system's original reservoirs: its triple oxygen isotopes cluster near the CCAM mixing line, suggesting the signature was little altered on its parent bodies. Crocker, Johnston et al., PNAS #AstroSky

Meteoritic organic matter records primitive oxygen reservoirs of the solar system | Frontier

The authors made high-precision triple oxygen isotope measurements on insoluble organic matter from a diverse suite of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.

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Pull two charges apart and the 'string' between them can snap, creating new particle pairs. On a trapped-ion quantum simulator, the authors watched a 1D version unfold in space and time: pairs appeared near the string's edges, then spread inward. De, Monroe et al., Nature Physics #quantum

String-breaking dynamics in a quantum simulator | Frontier

In quantum field theory, when the potential energy between two particles grows with their separation as if they were joined by a string, new particle pairs…

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How serotonin neurons wire the forebrain after birth: 4D whole-brain maps of mouse serotonin axons show region-specific growth plus a brain-wide, synchronized wave of innervation, lined up with a surge in wiring-molecule expression at postnatal day 4. Adams, Ren et al., PNAS #neuroskyence

System-level synchronization and subtype-specific modules govern brain-wide serotonin axon innervation | Frontier

The authors combined whole-brain developmental projection maps with single-cell transcriptomics to work out how serotonin neurons wire the forebrain after…

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New on Frontier: all 44 peer-reviewed papers that joined the index from 21 to 30 September, each scored on evidence, impact and novelty. Leading the issue: an AI framework that turns coarse climate projections into local weather, and four Mount Sinai studies of the human prefrontal cortex. #SciSky

Science News, 21-30 September: 44 New Breakthroughs, Scored | Frontier

44 peer-reviewed results joined Frontier's index from 21 to 30 September, led by neuroscience and biomedicine; an AI climate-risk framework tops it at 76.

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Earlier network theory suggested that differences between nodes destabilize a network. Montanari, Zanin and Motter show that came from simplified models: when each node has richer dynamics, disorder can stabilize networks, from neural circuits to power grids. Science #physics #ComplexSystems

Disorder-promoted stability | Frontier

Earlier studies of network dynamics suggested that heterogeneity among nodes inhibits stability, which is at odds with how common inherently heterogeneous…

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Some Pseudomonas phages infect via the type IV pilus, whose subunits vary widely between strains. Phages with sequence-diverse tail fiber C-terminal domains infected strains with highly divergent pilins; conserved ones were more sensitive to change. @dr-lori-burrows.bsky.social et al. #MicroSky

Structural diversification of phage tail fibers enables recognition of diverse type IV pili | Frontier

Pilus-dependent phages that infect Pseudomonas aeruginosa attach to its type IV pilus, whose major subunit, PilA, shows extensive sequence and chemical…

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The human prefrontal cortex across a lifetime, cell type by cell type: remodeling in development, relative stability in midlife, selective reactivation late in life, including glial programs tied to immune activation, stress and circadian change. @panosroussos.bsky.social et al. #neuroskyence

Lifespan single-cell transcriptomic atlas of the human prefrontal cortex | Frontier

Using a single-nucleus transcriptomic atlas spanning the human lifespan, the authors show that cell types in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex follow…

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Eating less protein as a larva makes fruit flies live longer. The carrier of that memory is Lsp2, a storage protein that stays low into early adulthood; silencing it cut ribosomal proteins and translation and extended lifespan. @kosakamotohina.bsky.social @obataf-lab.bsky.social #Drosophila

Lsp2 links early-life diet to adult translation and lifespan in Drosophila | Frontier

Using fruit flies, the authors show that restricting protein intake during the larval stage extends adult lifespan by reducing the levels of storage proteins.

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Phage genomes teem with genes of unknown function. HIDEN-SEQ, transposon sequencing for phages, recovered T4's decades-old essentiality map and found conditionally essential genes in non-model phages, including new antidefense factors. @humollidorentina.bsky.social @aharms485.bsky.social #MicroSky

Systematic mapping of bacteriophage gene essentiality with HIDEN-SEQ | Frontier

The authors present HIDEN-SEQ (hidden Acr-enabled transposon-insertion sequencing), a transposon-insertion sequencing method for phages that systematically…

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