Microplastics are often viewed as pollutants in their own right, but their environmental impact may extend far beyond the plastic particles themselves. A new review shows that microplastics can act as mobile "pollutant shuttles," carrying toxic chemicals, microorganisms and antibiotic resistance genes through water, soil, food webs and even across environmental boundaries.

Heavy metal pollution in farmland creates a problem that does not end when contaminated plants are harvested. Crop residues and plants used to remove metals from polluted soils can themselves contain substantial amounts of mercury, cadmium, lead, nickel and other potentially hazardous elements. If these materials are burned, landfilled or returned directly to farmland, the metals may be released again into the environment.

Three researchers at the Göttingen Campus have been awarded ERC Starting Grants by the European Research Council (ERC): Dr Sophie de Vries, evolutionary biologist at Göttingen University, for “Plant Immune Responses in Perpetual symbiosis (PIRPetum)"; Dr Tristan Stöber, computational neuroscientist at Göttingen University for “World Models in Brains and Machines: From Normative Hippocampus Models to Robust Planning in Artificial Intelligence and Back (WoM-BaM)”; Professor Elisa Oberbeckmann at the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), for “A chromosome-wide in vitro reconstitution system to dissect human nucleosome positioning mechanisms (vitroCHROM)”. Projects run for five years and are worth around 1.5 million euros each.

Satellite measurements detected declining photosynthetic activity in Western U.S. forests two years before bark-beetle mortality appeared in aerial detection surveys, according to new University of Utah-led research. The first-of-its-kind study suggests that satellite-observed chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), a measure of plant photosynthesis, could provide an early warning of forest stress. As drought, wildfire and insect outbreaks occur with increasing frequency across the American West, the technology could also help scientists understand how these disturbances affect forests’ ability to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere.

Harvard researchers have created a layered semiconductor and metasurface optical device that exhibits strong nonlinear frequency conversion, including at near-infrared wavelengths.