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Abstract Even prior to producing their first words, infants are developing a sophisticated speech processing system, with robust word recognition present by 4–6 months of age. These emergent linguistic skills, observed with behavioural investigations, are likely to rely on increasingly sophisticated neural underpinnings. The infant brain is known to robustly track the speech envelope, however previous cortical tracking studies were unable to demonstrate the presence of phonetic feature encoding. Here we utilise temporal response functions computed from electrophysiological responses to nursery rhymes to investigate the cortical encoding of phonetic features in a longitudinal cohort of infants when aged 4, 7 and 11 months, as well as adults. The analyses reveal an increasingly detailed and acoustically invariant phonetic encoding emerging over the first year of life, providing neurophysiological evidence that the pre-verbal human cortex learns phonetic categories. By contrast, we found no credible evidence for age-related increases in cortical tracking of the acoustic spectrogram.

Predicting structures and stabilities of solid-solid interfaces presents an ongoing and increasingly important challenge for development of new technologies. Here authors report an unconstrained and generally applicable non-periodic screening method for systematic exploration of material´s interfaces.

Giant dunes—stunning landforms that grow in patterns as wind blows sand grains over thousands of years—are measured across the entire planet for the first time. With this data, it’s shown the dunes can, in principle, grow in scale indefinitely.

The transcriptional adaptation processes of harmful self-reactive CD8+ T cells in the central nervous system are not well understood. Here the authors use a system in which self-reactive and virally generated CD8+ T cells are directly compared in vivo and demonstrate that TOX expression contributes to maintenance of auto-reactive CD8+ T cells through alteration of chromatin accessibility.

Bloch oscillations (BO) are intrinsically related to the geometry and topological properties of the underlying band structure. Here, Di Liberto et al. predict a unique topological effect manifested in the BOs of higher-order topological insulators through the interplay of non-Abelian Berry curvature and quantized Wilson loops.

Ibrutinib has demonstrated high response rates in B-cell lymphomas but a lot of ibrutinib-treated patients relapse with resistance. This study unified TME-mediatedde novoand acquired drug resistance through B-cell receptor signalling and PI3K-AKT-mTOR axis and provides a combination therapeutic strategy against B-cell malignancies.