Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Articles in this Issue
Harnessing polyploidy for climate-resilient crops: Lessons from the evolutionary model, allotetraploid cotton
Escalating pressures of global climate change necessitate developing agricultural systems and crop varieties with enhanced resilience. Polyploidy, the state of possessing multiple complete sets of chr...
Plug-and-play assembly of biodegradable ionizable lipids for potent mRNA delivery and gene editing in vivo
mRNA-based gene editing therapeutics offer the potential to permanently cure diseases but are hindered by suboptimal delivery platforms. Here, we devise a robust combinatorial chemistry for the plug-a...
AI assists adversarial collaboration in debate on minority salience
The advancement of science depends on rigorous tests of competing hypotheses, yet many disputes are left unresolved. Adversarial collaboration—where opposing scientists jointly design decisive tests—i...
Synaptic and neural pathway redundancy enables the robustness of a sensory-motor reflex and promotes predation escape in <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i>
As a basic unit of the nervous system, the sensory-motor reflex circuit is fast and robust. However, it is not entirely clear how this robustness is achieved, given that various genetic perturbations...
In situ evidence of self-accelerating turbidity currents
Self-accelerating turbidity currents (SATCs) are hypothesized to be the primary mechanism for transporting vast amounts of sediment to the deep ocean. However, theoretical predictions of SATCs have pr...
Conscious and nonconscious thought: Insights from the neuroscience of decision-making
Conscious thought is often treated as a special class of neural processing, distinct from the nonconscious computations that guide most behavior. Here I offer a different perspective, grounded in the...
Genome-wide association mapping and targeted loss of function studies identify <i>Shroom3</i> as a driver of hyperpolyploidy and ventricular dilation
Various states of cardiomyocyte (CM) polyploidy have been associated with cardiac injury responses, including regeneration and heart failure. However, our understanding of the comprehensive mechanisms...
Aging increases the cortical resources allocated to static balance maintenance
Maintaining balance requires a complex interplay between sensory and motor processes, and this ability deteriorates with age, impairing daily life activities and contributes to increased fall risks. I...
Reply to Romano and De Dreu: Why violent extremism cannot be reduced to laboratory games
Intentions poorly explain how and why people engage in offensive and defensive forms of violence
Hybridogenesis as an intermediate step between sexual reproduction and parthenogenesis in stick insects
Many organisms reproduce through noncanonical modes such as parthenogenesis or hybridogenesis (clonal transmission of one parent’s chromosomes), but whether these arise abruptly or stepwise from each...
Isotopic evidence for dietary variability among eastern Africa’s first pastoralists
During the terminal Pleistocene through Holocene, changes in dietary diversity signaled fundamental shifts in the way humans related to food resources in many parts of the globe. To understand local a...
Human amplification of climate-induced greenhouse gas emissions from global small water bodies
Human activities amplify climate-induced greenhouse gas emissions from small water bodies (SWBs), creating critical but unquantified feedback in the global carbon cycle. Here, by training machine lear...
Seasonal shellfish exploitation by Neanderthals 115,000 years ago
The southern coast of Europe has been at the center of archaeological debates contrasting the social and cognitive capabilities of Neanderthals and modern humans. Early evidence of marine resource exp...
Arctic ecosystems shaped mammalian dispersal and diversification before the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction
High-latitude terrestrial ecosystems are commonly viewed as marginal environments to deep-time evolutionary innovation, yet their role in shaping biotic dispersal, diversification, and survivorship re...