The German Research Foundation DFG is providing 2.2 million euros for Tom Beneke’s Emmy Noether Junior Research Group at the University of Würzburg. He is investigating how Leishmania parasites, transmitted by sand flies, spread throughout the body.

Ports are typically highly polluted environments, which makes it imperative to find new ways to clean them up. Here, scientists studied five species of common Mediterranean sea sponges to see whether they can function as ‘ecosystem engineers’ for filtering water and nature restoration. One tested species, commonly called the ‘chicken kidney sponge’ proved especially hardy when transplanted to a busy polluted recreational port near Girona, Spain. Under these challenging conditions, it typically thrived to the point where it could reproduce asexually into dispersing clones. The authors intend to use this species in further long-term renaturalization trials.

Ex-captive elephants released into the wild adapt quite well to the return to wild environments, according to a study published July 29, 2026 in the open access journal PLOS One by Tenisha Roos and Tamara Eggeling of the Elephant Reintegration Trust of South Africa and colleagues.

In a study of Swiss adults, women and people who spent more time with a pet or another animal they might feel close to reported feeling more attached to the animal and receiving more socio-emotional support from it. However, the study found little evidence for links between pet ownership and participants’ overall wellbeing. Rahel Marti of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues present these findings in the open access journal PLOS One on July 29, 2026.

Researchers at Tulane University, Stanford University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have discovered an antibody system never before documented in mammals. Vesper bats, a family encompassing more than 500 species, possess two distinct sets of antibody-producing genes, while every other known mammal has only one. Published in Science Advances, the findings reveal a previously unknown source of immune diversity that could help scientists investigate how bats coexist with viruses without becoming seriously ill.

Plantations of native fine-flavour cacao in countries like Peru have become rare due to the dominance of high-yielding cacao varieties for mass production. This threatens the valuable native cacao crop’s genetic diversity. An international research team, led by the University of Göttingen and Bioversity International, studied the use of selected genotypes of the native variety “Blanco de Piura”, known by local farmers for their high productivity, for grafting fully grown cacao trees. The researchers found that grafted trees yielded 59% more than non-grafted controls after three years. They also quantified the contribution of management practices, as well as plantation designs using either one or multiple clones of the native cacao variety. Results were published in the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development.