Healthy soils are key to securing Europe's food, water, climate and biodiversity. Yet more than 60% of soils in the EU remain unhealthy, and the scientific knowledge that could help reverse the trend rarely reaches the people who write policy.

In the beginning of October, 15 partners from 10 European countries met in Nancy, France for the kick-off of PSOILICY, a new EU-funded project that will build the interfaces, hubs and tools needed to turn soil knowledge into evidence-based decisions.

Public biomedical databases such as NHANES, UK Biobank, FAERS, the Global Burden of Disease Study, and FinnGen have become a focus of the research-integrity debate, following a rapid rise in papers built from broadly accessible datasets. A correspondence published in Medicine Discovery argues that the quality of public database research rests on the study process, while the database name provides little information about scientific quality, and that treating a familiar database name as a marker of low quality risks confusing the infrastructure with the production model that exploits it. Citing a scientometric analysis of 36 health datasets — nine of which showed publication patterns consistent with rapid, formulaic expansion, producing 23,005 indexed publications in 2025 and an estimated excess of 11,577 publications above the prior trend — the authors argue that the same NHANES files support careful epidemiology, surveillance, and methods development as well as formulaic work, and that the recent surge emerged long after the survey architecture and its public documentation were established. They describe how generative AI has changed the economics of secondary data research, distinguishing researcher-directed assistance from more autonomous workflows that extend into question formulation and analytical planning, and warning of a plausible risk of automated hypothesis fishing. The correspondence proposes three actions for editorial policy: a short dataset-specific methods note for heavily reused resources; stronger transparency around analysis code, preregistration, and AI use; and editorial screening focused on study conduct rather than data provenance. 

Inspired by the remarkable ability of sea cucumbers to change the stiffness of their bodies, University of Waterloo researchers have developed a gel that could one day help repair damaged tendons and other soft tissues without leaving permanent material behind.