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The impact of extreme heat on crop yields is an increasingly pressing issue given anthropogenic climate warming. However, some of the physical mechanisms involved in these impacts remain unclear, impeding adaptation-relevant insight and reliable projections of future climate impacts on crops. Here, using a multiple regression model based on observational data, we show that while extreme dry heat steeply reduced U.S. corn and soy yields, humid heat extremes had insignificant impacts and even boosted yields in some areas, despite having comparably high dry-bulb temperatures as their dry heat counterparts. This result suggests that conflating dry and humid heat extremes may lead to underestimated crop yield sensitivities to extreme dry heat. Rainfall tends to precede humid but not dry heat extremes, suggesting that multivariate weather sequences play a role in these crop responses. Our results provide evidence that extreme heat in recent years primarily affected yields by inducing moisture stress, and that the conflation of humid and dry heat extremes may lead to inaccuracy in projecting crop yield responses to warming and changing humidity.

Reading disability exhibited defects in different cognitive domains, including word reading fluency, word reading accuracy, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and morphological awareness. To identify the genetic basis of Chinese reading disability, we conducted a genome‐wide association study (GWAS) of the cognitive traits related to Chinese reading disability in 2284 unrelated Chinese children. Among the traits analyzed in the present GWAS, we detected one genome‐wide significant association (p < 5 × 10⁻⁸) on word reading fluency for one SNP on 4p16.2, within EVC genes (rs6446395,p = 7.33 × 10⁻¹⁰). Rs6446395 also showed significant association with Chinese character reading accuracy (p = 2.95 × 10⁻⁴), phonological awareness (p = 7.11 × 10⁻³) and rapid automatized naming (p = 4.71 × 10⁻³), implying multiple effects of this variant. The eQTL data showed that rs6446395 affected EVC expression in the cerebellum. Gene‐based analyses identified a gene (PRDM10) to be associated with word reading fluency at the genome‐wide level. Our study discovered a new candidate susceptibility variant for reading ability and provided new insights into the genetics of developmental dyslexia in Chinese children.