Highlighted Article: A bioinert confinement system enables dissection of how stiffness and timing shape gastruloid development, revealing uncoupling between polarization and transcriptional programs.

In a new forward-looking PRL Essay, Tadashi Takayanagi explores the intersection of quantum information theory with quantum gravity within the framework of holographic duality, and its potential to he...

Rates of evolution are fundamental to understand the processes that shaped the history of life. The predominant view holds that high rates of pheno...

Nature Reviews Bioengineering, Published online: 28 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s44222-025-00280-yEnhancers are genomic elements critical for regulating gene expression. In this Review, the authors discuss how sequence-to-function models can be used to…

Gene duplication and subsequent paralogue diversification are major obstacles to genotype-to-phenotype predictability.

Maximizing the amount of work harvested from an environment is important for a wide variety of biological and technological processes, from energy-harvesting processes such as photosynthesis to energy storage systems such as fuels and batteries. Here, we consider the maximization of free energy—and by extension, the maximum extractable work—that can be gained by a classical or quantum system that undergoes driving by its environment. We consider how the free energy gain depends on the initial state of the system while also accounting for the cost of preparing the system. We provide simple necessary and sufficient conditions for increasing the gain of free energy by varying the initial state. We also derive simple formulae that relate the free energy gained using the optimal initial state rather than another suboptimal initial state. Finally, we demonstrate that the problem of finding the optimal initial state may have two distinct regimes, one easy and...

Worldwide declines in the abundance of non-pest insects threaten ecosystems, food production and human wellbeing. A large-scale study has systematically examined field and environmental levels of 1,02...