Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Articles in this Issue
The case for contextually grounded executive function measurement
Standard EF tasks can still have predictive validity within diverse cultural contexts
QnAs with Yukiko Yamashita
Mycoviruses confer hypovirulence but enhance antifungal volatile organic compound production in a phytopathogenic fungus
Hypovirulence-associated mycoviruses can be frequently isolated in nature despite their likely compromised ecological fitness, but how their fungal hosts survive in natural environments remains largel...
The detection of episodic memory in others biases social choice
We often share personal memories with others, but the social function of episodic memory retrieval is not clear. In two experiments (N 1 = 50, N...
Charles Weissmann (1931–2025), an outstanding and captivating molecular biologist
With the death of Charles Weissmann, molecular biology has lost of one of its most productive, outstanding, and critical representatives. A molecular biologist who became famous through his ground-bre...
Correction for Lazzaroni et al., Wolves respond differently to human cues as they expand into urban landscapes
The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size
The evolution of reproductive specialization, in which somatic cells forfeit reproduction, represents a fundamental innovation in complex multicellular life. This specialization imposes a fitness cost...
Cerebellar contributions to action and cognition: Prediction, timescale, and continuity
The cerebellum is implicated in nearly every domain of human cognition, yet our understanding of how this subcortical structure contributes to cognition remains elusive. Efforts on this front have ten...
How do RNA molecules distinguish self from non-self?
RNA molecules form homotypic clusters in a variety of contexts. mRNAs enriched in germ granules in Drosophila embryos are a canonical example, with...
Reefense: Living shoreline mosaics can achieve ecological and engineering outcomes with interdisciplinary design
Living shorelines that comprise oyster reefs within a mosaic of multiple coastal habitats can be a resilient and adaptive coastal protection alternative to conventional engineered structures. The succ...
Snooping helices: The elastic path finding algorithm of growing hyphae
How living organisms utilize physical mechanisms to sense their environments and make informed decisions is an open question at the interface of biology and physics. In filamentous organisms like fung...
Correction for Anand et al., Convolutional neural networks outperform other presence-only species distribution modeling algorithms
Use of a cytochrome P450 humanized mouse model to refine schistosomiasis drug discovery
Control of schistosomiasis, a neglected tropical disease caused by infection with Schistosoma spp ., remains reliant on a single chemotherapy, praziquantel (PZQ...
Reciprocal regulation of TNF receptor 1–mediated signaling and inflammatory damages by MARCH2 and USP22
The tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptor 1 (TNF-R1) plays critical roles in inflammatory response and autoimmune diseases. The underlying mechanisms on posttranslational regulation of TNF-R1 and its f...
Many paths to destruction: Family-specific turnover and stress responses for tRNA introns
In organisms ranging from Archaea to humans, a subset of genes encoding tRNAs contain introns. Upon splicing, the tRNA exons are joined and the released free introns are rapidly degraded. Although tRN...
Energetics of biomolecular shells in core–shell nanocomplexes
In this work, the stabilization enthalpy of patchy core–shell nanocomplexes is used to assess their thermodynamic stability. It is defined as the enthalpy of formation of a hydrated core–shell complex...
Conformational equilibria in the activation of cystine-knot hormone receptors
Human glycoprotein hormones such as thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) belong to a broader family of cystine-knot hormones (CKHs), all of which act through leucin...
Fast automated adjoints for spectral PDE solvers
We present an automated procedure for computing model gradients for partial differential equation (PDE) solvers built on sparse spectral methods, a broad class of numerical techniques widely used in t...
Coalescence and translation: A language model for population genetics
Probabilistic models such as the sequentially Markovian coalescent have long provided a powerful framework for population genetic inference, enabling reconstruction of demographic history and ancestra...
Amoeboid–mesenchymal transition and the proteolytic control of cancer invasion plasticity
Invasion plasticity allows malignant cells to toggle between collective, mesenchymal, and amoeboid phenotypes while traversing extracellular matrix (ECM) barriers. Current dogma holds that collective...
Infants use helping to infer the existence and strength of caring relationships
Prosocial and antisocial behaviors can reflect the actor’s positive or negative feelings toward a specific person and their broader disposition toward others’ welfare. Observers’ inferences about thes...
Predicting and controlling laser-induced breakup and multidirectional propulsion of liquid droplets
Laser-driven control of droplets is important in microfluidics, targeted delivery, and droplet-based laser–matter interactions, yet propulsion direction and breakup remain difficult to predict. Here,...
Brain–computer interface–based neurofeedback training enables transferable control of cortical state switching in humans
Behavioral flexibility relies on transient neural dynamics that govern cortical state transitions. However, whether humans can deliberately learn to control such state transitions and generalize train...
Extended Rice–Thomson analysis and atomistic simulations revealing grain boundary effects on fracture in refractory high-entropy alloys
Understanding how grain boundaries mediate fracture remains a critical challenge in designing ductile, high-performance refractory alloys. Here, we extend the Rice–Thomson criterion to account for the...