Climate, pollution, agriculture, food systems and natural resources.
Yefoungnigui Souleymane Yeo's team found that biopesticides made from lemongrass and African basil, plus a methanol Moringa leaf extract, curbed stem-end rot on wounded harvested mangoes under controlled conditions.
Dr. Anne Berger's case collection from German care centers shows that cut injuries in hedgehogs are rising, often fatal, and frequently caused by garden machinery, especially robotic lawnmowers.
Dr. Nico Arcilla's team recorded a rich bird community in Togo's Fazao-Malfakassa National Park but failed to find dozens of previously reported species, amid widespread poaching, charcoal burning and land clearing.
Dr. Andrés Tejero-Andrade's team developed corrections and a smoothing filter that clean noisy electrical resistivity data from rugged terrain, revealing a possible buried chamber and contaminated soil more clearly.
Dr. Heying Zhan's team found that building a highway through a Zhuang village in southwest China broke up extended-family neighborhoods, took farmland and destroyed a sacred rock central to communal life.
Professor Gottfried Kirchengast's team built a traceable global temperature record showing recent yearly warming has passed the lower Paris limit, with the long-term average likely to follow this decade.
Professor Francisco Matus's team found that, in oxygen-free laboratory tests, rainforest soils locked much of the added nitrite into organic matter through chemical reactions alone, whether or not the soils were volcanic.
Dr. Fatih Evren's team developed a way to measure the radiant warmth people feel from room surfaces using low-cost thermal sensors, outperforming traditional black globe sensors in real rooms.
Dr. Alexandra Cory's team found that the Maillard browning reaction releases carbon dioxide even from sterilized peat and ties up nitrogen, helping explain why bogs decompose so slowly.
Dr. Zhuoyu Wang and colleagues found that fermenting blends of apple and grape pomace produced drinks whose color, flavor and fermentation speed depended on the mix, with equal blends performing best.
Dr. Rajeev Roychand's team found that coffee grounds charred without oxygen made concrete stronger when used in place of some sand, whereas untreated grounds weakened it.
Dr. Hailong Zhou's team found in animals that polystyrene microplastics combined with the pollutant benzo[a]pyrene damaged the gut lining, letting fats reach the kidneys and trigger ferroptosis.
Dr. Lone Jespersen and Dr. Shingai Nyarugwe built a framework for judging food safety culture assessment tools and found that most existing tools had not been validated comprehensively.
![Diagram of a mouse exposed to microplastics and benzo[a]pyrene, linking gut damage to kidney ferroptosis](https://i0.wp.com/sciencefeatured.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Activation-of-gut-metabolite-ACSL4_LPCAT3-by-microplastics-in-drinking-water-mediates-ferroptosis-via-gut%E2%80%93kidney-axis-1.jpg?crop=7.92%2C8.15%2C84.06%2C83.61&w=560&ssl=1)
