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A comparison of deep multiomics profiles across ethnicity, geography, and age

Multiomics profiling of healthy individuals reveals differences across molecular layers and key pathways related to immune, metabolic, and microbiome-linked processes across ethnicities, while geographic relocation reshapes these networks and influences aging trajectories.
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Fronto-insular circuit mechanisms of accelerated intermittent theta burst stimulation

An optogenetic model of accelerated intermittent theta burst stimulation reveals cell type-specific plasticity mechanisms and a key role for a fronto-insular circuit in driving the antidepressant effects of this treatment in humans.
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The spatiotemporal dynamics of postnatal vascularization in the mouse brain

Whole-brain tissue clearing and spatial transcriptomics were applied to map postnatal vascular development in the mouse brain, identifying three coordinated phases that link vascular growth to neuronal maturation.
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Controlled human influenza infection reveals heterogeneous expulsion of infectious virus into air

A platform called MIST enables quantification and genotyping of infectious influenza in expelled respiratory particles, revealing diverse, individual-specific viral loads and aerosolized variants that correlate with saliva and nasopharyngeal viral loads and symptoms. Overall, the findings indicate heterogeneity in transmission potential.
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Child Vaccination Status and Behavioral and Social Drivers of Vaccination Among Their Caregivers in the Philippines: Cross-Sectional Survey Study Comparison of Household, Mobile, and Online Modes

Background: The World Health Organization recommends that countries routinely collect data on the behavioral and social drivers (BeSD) of vaccination to inform public health interventions that increase vaccine uptake. There is a need to identify data collection methods that can rapidly and inexpensively collect representative data, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Objective: This study aimed to understand BeSD drivers of vaccination in the Philippines and assess the trade-offs between survey methods. We compared responses to household, mobile, and online surveys in terms of demographics, vaccination status, responses to BeSD questions, and cost. Methods: We conducted concurrent household, mobile (SMS text messaging and interactive voice response), and online surveys among caregivers of children 2 years of age and below in Regions V and XII of the Philippines, with sampling differing by survey method. We assessed, for each survey method, (1) respondent demographics (sex, age, region, and socioeconomic status) and (2) the weighted proportion of responses from caregivers of children who received at least one dose of diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT)–containing vaccine. We estimated the weighted proportion of each BeSD survey response option and calculated the financial cost (monetary outlays) per survey response from an implementer’s perspective by summing the costs incurred in each survey method and dividing by the number of responses received. Results: We surveyed a total of 1201 household respondents, 2153 mobile respondents, and 398 online respondents from January to March 2025. We found that online and mobile survey respondents were more likely to be male and have completed high school than household survey respondents. The weighted proportion of respondents indicating that their child had received at least one dose of DPT vaccine was 91.8% (n=1090; 95% CI 90%‐93.3%) for the household survey, 90.3% (n=1853) for the mobile survey, and 85% (n=346) for the online survey. With regard to vaccine demand, more than 85% of respondents in each survey method indicated that vaccines are very important, very safe, supported by family, and that they knew where to bring a child for vaccination. More than 30% of mobile and online survey respondents indicated that it was not easy to pay for vaccination. The financial cost to conduct the survey per survey response was US $2.61 for the online survey, US $6.93 for the mobile survey, and US $29.38 for the household survey. Conclusions: In the Philippines, household, mobile, and online survey methods reached caregivers of children who were unvaccinated against DPT, and these proportions were similar across survey methods. BeSD responses indicated high vaccine demand and challenges in caregivers’ cost to access vaccination. Determining the most appropriate survey method depends on trade-offs between representativeness and costs. However, areas with strong connectivity and high mobile device ownership can consider mobile and online methods as a lower-cost alternative to rapidly collect BeSD data.
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High-precision measurement of the W boson mass with the CMS experiment

Nature, Published online: 08 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10168-5

The CMS experiment at CERN reports one of the highest-precision measurements of the W boson mass, finding it in line with standard model predictions and at odds with recent anomalous measurements.
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Investigating the replicability of the social and behavioural sciences

Nature, Published online: 01 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-10078-y

A large-scale study on the replicability of claims from social and behavioural science journals reports that about half of the results replicate in the same patterns as the original study.
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Reproducibility and robustness of economics and political science research

Nature, Published online: 01 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10251-x

Robustness checks and reproduction of analyses with existing and updated data based on 110 articles in economics and political science journals with data and code-sharing requirements found high levels of robustness and reproducibility and determined that robustness was not dependent on author characteristics or data availability.
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Improving Retrieval Augmented Generation for Health Care by Fine-Tuning Clinical Embedding Models: Development and Evaluation Study

Background: Embedding models are critical components of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for retrieving and searching unstructured medical data. However, existing models are predominantly trained on publicly available English datasets, limiting their effectiveness in non-English health care settings. More importantly, these models lack training on real-world clinical documents, leading to inaccurate context retrieval when integrated into RAG systems for health care applications. This gap is particularly pronounced in specialized medical documentation containing domain-specific terminology, abbreviations, and nuanced clinical language. Objective: This retrospective study aimed to develop and validate embedding models specifically trained on real-world clinical documents from multiple medical specialties to improve medical information retrieval (IR) and RAG system performance in both German and English language contexts. Methods: We fine-tuned embedding models, so-called sentence transformers, using the multilingual-e5-large architecture as a foundation. Training data consisted of approximately 11 million question-answer pairs synthetically generated from 400,000 diverse clinical documents from a large German tertiary hospital, spanning 163,840 patients and 282,728 clinical cases between 2018 and 2023. The large language model generated medically relevant questions and corresponding answers for each document. The dataset was additionally pseudonymized and translated into English to aim for broader applicability. Models were evaluated in 2 distinct scenarios: IR using questions with multiple relevant passages, and RAG system performance in both cross-patient and patient-centered contexts. Results: In the IR evaluation, the fine-tuned miracle model achieved a mAP@100 of 0.27, outperforming the multilingual-e5-large baseline (0.14) and state-of-the-art models such as bge-m3 (0.11). In the RAG evaluation, the model demonstrated robust performance comparable with the baseline in the constrained patient-centered scenario (BERTScore F1 0.781 vs 0.778) and showed moderate improvements in the unconstrained cross-patient setting (BLEURT 0.56 vs 0.53). Notably, the model trained on pseudonymized data achieved comparable retrieval performance (mAP@100 0.25) and the highest scores for patient-centered contextual precision (0.93). Performance gains were robust in the German dataset, while the translated English model demonstrated promising results as a proof of concept for cross-lingual transfer. Conclusions: By leveraging a comprehensive real-world dataset spanning multiple medical specialties and using large language models for synthetic question generation, we successfully created and validated domain-specific embedding models. These models can improve medical IR in large-scale search spaces and perform competitively in constrained RAG applications. By publishing the models trained on pseudonymized data, other health care institutions can integrate or adapt these embedding models to their needs. This work establishes a reproducible framework for developing domain-specific clinical embedding models, with the potential to improve data retrieval in medical settings.
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Genomic history of early dogs in Europe

Nature, Published online: 25 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10112-7

Genome-wide analysis shows European dogs existed by 14,200 years ago, were already genetically distinct, received less Neolithic Southwest Asian admixture than humans did and contributed substantially to later European dogs.
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Correction: LXRα limits TGFβ-dependent hepatocellular carcinoma associated fibroblast differentiation

Oncogenesis, Published online: 18 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41389-026-00610-8

Correction: LXRα limits TGFβ-dependent hepatocellular carcinoma associated fibroblast differentiation
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