COVER A death’s-head hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos), fitted with a miniaturized radio transmitter, is released at dusk in Konstanz, Germany, before a night of tracking. These enigmatic large moths migrate in the autumn, moving through Europe toward the Mediterranean and possibly as far as Africa. Individual tracking has revealed that these moths are able to correct for wind drift to maintain their course during migration. See page 764.

Photo: Christian Ziegler

ONLINE COVER Curved 3D structures allow electronics to better interact with complex shapes like the human brain. Xue et al. designed an assembly method that shapes 2D thin films into 3D structures to fit a diverse array of curves. A flexible underlayer is formed into a 3D shape and then stretched flat. Once the 2D film is attached, the stretched position is slowly released, molding the thin film into the desired 3D structure. Electronics that can fit complex curves will allow for better integration in health monitoring, curved displays, and human-machine interfaces.

ONLINE COVER Exclusion of CD45 from a CAR-T Synapse. This month’s cover features a confocal microscopy image in which a human T cell expressing a CD19-targeting chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), stained in red, has formed an immunological synapse with a human Raji B cell lymphoma cell (blue). CD45 (green), a bulky tyrosine phosphatase enzyme that can inhibit CAR-T activation, is effectively excluded from the central portion of this synapse. Xiao et al. developed a size-exclusion model to explain how the relative sizes of the CAR construct and the CD45 isoform on a CAR-T cell and the target antigen on a tumor cell calibrate CD45’s dampening of antigen-triggered CAR-T activation at the synapse.

ONLINE COVER A Model of Oneself. Robots, like humans and animals, require self-models to be able to anticipate and plan future actions. Chen et al. developed a method that enables a robot arm to model its morphology and kinematics using an approach based on query-driven visual self-modeling. This month’s cover is a multiple-exposure image of a self-modeled robot arm touching a small red sphere while avoiding a large red cube.

ONLINE COVER This week, Huynh et al. find that different structural, biochemical, and biological effects of Gln⁶¹ mutations in KRAS may explain their unexpectedly low incidence compared to other KRAS mutants in cancer. The findings have clinical implications for treating patients with KRAS-mutant cancers, as highlighted in the Focus by Sealover and Kortum. The image is of F-actin fibers in mouse fibroblasts expressing a Gln⁶¹-mutant KRAS.

ONLINE COVER Reversing Glomerulonephritis. The cover image shows a 3D reconstruction of a whole glomerulus using optical tissue clearing of kidney sections from a mouse with crescentic glomerulonephritis treated with the drug panobinostat. Administration of panobinostat, which is used to treat hematopoietic stem cell disorders, reduced the formation of pathological crescents in the kidneys of mice with severe glomerulonephritis. Panobinostat treatment increased podocyte production by boosting differentiation of renal epithelial progenitor cells (Melica et al.). The increase in podocytes, revealed by staining for the podocyte marker podocin (expression of which is indicated by staining density), led to decreased proteinuria and improved kidney function in these animals, suggesting the potential of panobinostat for treating human glomerulonephritis.