As the public grows more concerned about plastic pollution, some elected officials are getting onboard with “advanced recycling,” which is being promoted by industry groups. Although this process might sound like a good way to deal with the plastics problem, environmental advocates warn that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, according to a cover story in Chemical & Engineering News, an independent news outlet of the American Chemical Society.

Production of animal protein in China has increased by 800% over the past 40 years, driven by population growth, urbanization and higher worker wages. However, the amount of climate-warming nitrous oxide released from animal farming in the country has not risen as quickly, thanks to science-led policy and farm management interventions in the way animals are fed and their manure recycled.

What are the barriers to the adoption of electric cars? Although the main financial and technological obstacles have been removed, their market share still needs to increase. In a recent study, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) investigated the cognitive factors that still dissuade many people from switching to electric cars. They found that car owners systematically underestimate the capacity of electric driving ranges to meet their daily needs. These results, published in Nature Energy, open up new avenues to speed up the electrification of mobility in addition to conventional policy approaches.

Northpond Labs, the R&D-focused affiliate of Northpond Ventures, has signed an agreement to support a second Wyss Institute project and accelerate its development toward commercialization. The new agreement funds SomaCode, led by Soufiane Aboulhouda, Oliver Dodd, and George Church, Ph.D. SomaCode aims to solve a key problem plaguing cell therapies: delivering therapeutic cells to their targets in the body. Because cell therapies are administered via the blood, it's currently very difficult to get them to home to a specific organ or tissue. SomaCode’s pooled in vivo discovery platform identifies molecular "zip codes" on target tissues that can be used to improve immune cell delivery to solid tumors and other diseases.

The National Institutes of the Health (NIH) has awarded researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai a four-year grant to study the role of the human microbiome in rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, and other autoimmune diseases. The grant is part of the NIH’s Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Autoimmune and Immune-Mediated Diseases (AMP® AIM) program, which is designed to speed the discovery of new treatments and diagnostics. It will support the Microbiome Technology and Analytic Center Hub (Micro-TEACH), a multidisciplinary team of researchers at Icahn Mount Sinai and NYU Langone Health.

Researchers at the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine received a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, Department of Defense (DOD), to study the role of obesity and oxidative stress in Alzheimer’s disease.