Pnas.org

This paper addresses the possible developmental origins of humans’ preference for native speakers. Infants’ preference to attend to someone speaking their native language is well documented and has been interpreted as a developmental precursor of...

Changes in snow cover, sea ice cover, and surface albedo over the Arctic are important for local warming and midlatitude climate change. Here, multiple datasets are used to show that observed reductions in the Arctic surface albedo in recent decades...

Natural infections with flesh-eating bacteria from exposure to water can have devastating patient outcomes. Aeromonas hydrophila causes necrotizing fasciitis (NF). A patient was infected with 4 A. hydrophila strains, 3 clonal (NF2, NF3, and NF4) and...

The capabilities for invasion and metastasis underlie the mortality and morbidity of most forms of human cancer. Currently, there are no effective therapies specifically targeting these cancer phenotypes, in part due to the paucity of dominant...

The evolution of new metabolic pathways has been a driver of diversification from the last universal common ancestor 3.8 billion y ago to the present. Bioinformatic evidence suggests that many pathways were assembled by recruiting promiscuous...

Color pattern mimicry in Heliconius butterflies provides a key example of trait evolution via selection on large effect genes. To understand how individual genes drive the evolution of new, complex traits, we functionally characterized 5 enhancers...

This study advances our appreciation and understanding of the role of colon dysbiosis in the pathogenesis of colorectal cancer. In a human pilot study of 266 individuals, greater epigenomic (methylation) DNA alterations correlated with CRC and...

We present an approach to normalize hurricane damage, where damage is framed in terms of an equivalent area of total destruction. This has some advantages over customary normalization schemes, and we demonstrate that our record has reduced variance...

Forecasts routinely provide critical information for dangerous weather events but not yet for epidemics. Researchers develop computational models that can be used for infectious disease forecasting, but forecasts have not been broadly compared or...

We shock a full-scale simulation model of a national health care system by locally removing health care providers. We measure resilience of the system in terms of how fast and to what extent it can recover its ability to deliver adequate health...

Electronic-cigarette smoke (ECS) is designed to deliver nicotine, and its use is gaining popularity. Previously, we found that ECS induces DNA damage and inhibits DNA repair in the mouse lungs and bladder urothelium. Nicotine induces the same types...

Human brain evolution is often considered synonymous with cortical expansion, in particular of the prefrontal cortex, a cortical region required for our remarkable cognitive abilities such as personality expression, planning, and decision making. In...

Anti–CTLA-4 ( Left ) and anti–PD-1 ( Right ) antibodies. Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Fvasconcellos. More than 250 combination immunotherapies in which a pair of agents simultaneously target the immune checkpoint molecules cytotoxic T...

Tropical rainforest regions have large hydropower generation potential that figures prominently in many nations’ energy growth strategies. Feasibility studies of hydropower plants typically ignore the effect of future deforestation or assume that...

Why are women still underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs? Social processes beyond individual preferences may shape the STEM employment trajectories of new mothers and new fathers differently. Using...