Anthropocene Magazine

We occasionally use flowers to decorate food, but few people would think of flowers themselves as food. Now a new study challenges that, finding that the common marigold contains protein levels similar to other plant-based sources.

This potentially opens up a new sustainable protein alternative to meat, especially as the new research finds that these flowers could have diverse uses in food.

For their experiments the researchers sourced an abundant supply of dried marigold flowers, and then set about extracting protein from their petals. First they blitzed these into a powder, creating a mixture that was distilled, centrifuged, and filtered. Next, they applied different chemical compounds including alcohol and sodium chloride to separate and extract ingredients from the mix. Among these were four types of protein: albumin, globulin, glutelin and prolamin. In each case the researchers measured how much protein they had extracted, and examined its structural composition. 

From this, they found they could extract almost 9 grams of protein per every 100 grams. These levels make marigolds nutritionally similar, in protein terms, to other edible flowers like the banana flower, which is commonly used in South Asian cuisine. Perhaps more familiar to many people is quinoa, a grain valued for its relatively high protein content: marigolds had similar protein levels to this popular foodstuff, too.  

This means marigolds could add to the increasing array of plant-based proteins, perhaps diversifying the options to attract people away from meat. But it wasn’t just the nutritional content that struck the researchers: they found that marigolds contained other properties which could make them a valuable additive for the food industry. 

 

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For example, the experiments showed that some proteins in marigolds have a low pH which make them a good emulsifying agent. This would be useful for making foods like mayonnaise and salad dressings where oil needs to be mixed into water. Other marigold proteins were found to remain stable at high temperatures of up to 105 °C—making them more reliable under heat pressure than other plant proteins like chickpeas—suggesting that it could be useful in baking applications. The researchers also highlight that the high globulin content in marigolds gives them a good foaming capacity, which is valuable for making aerated ingredients like whipped toppings for baked goods. 

Finding markets for this food stuff could be a challenge, as with any relatively new and unfamiliar food. But something that drove the researchers’ original interest in marigolds is the ready and abundant supply: huge quantities of these flowers end up as waste each year, especially in India and Mexico where millions of decorative marigolds are used in events and festivals. The researchers estimate that roughly 40% of used marigolds end up being thrown away. 

This is potentially a huge untapped supply of sustainable protein. “People are increasingly aware of food waste and are seeking innovative solutions,” says study lead author Anand Mohan, associate professor of food science and technology at the University of Georgia.

“Demonstrating that something as common and overlooked as a flower can be transformed into a valuable food ingredient makes science both relatable and impactful.”

Mohan et. al. “Assessing Structural, Thermal, and Functional Characteristics of Marigold Flower Protein as a Sustainable Food Ingredient.” ACS Food Science & Technology. 2026. 

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Millions of people around the world drink coffee to boost their energy. Researchers in South Korea have now given new meaning to the concept of coffee as fuel.

The team from the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) report a way to convert soggy coffee grounds into a high-quality coal-like fuel. The process, reported in the journal Chemical Engineering Journal, takes just 90 seconds from start to finish. And the final product has fuel performance comparable to conventional charcoal, according to the researchers.

The world generates almost 10 million tons of waste coffee grounds each year. Most of this ends up in landfills or gets incinerated. The spent grounds hold a lot of energy because of their high calorific value. But they have a high moisture content, so using them as any kind of biofuel would first require a long drying process or oil extraction.

But the KIGAM researchers eliminated the pre-drying step. Instead, they developed a way to use the moisture to accelerate the reactions and improve the quality of the solid fuel.

In the new technique, called flame plasma pyrolysis, the researchers start with coffee grounds containing around 55% moisture. They create a plasma flame by burning liquefied petroleum gas and compressed air. This creates a plasma as hot as 900°C and puts the coffee waste under immense pressure.

The pressurized heat rapidly vaporizes the moisture, triggering hundreds of tiny explosions in the coffee grounds, reducing the mass of the grounds by 83.3% and transforming them into a dry, porous biochar, all within 90 seconds.

The process boosts the calorific value of the coffee gounds by about 33%. The biochar exhibited a heating value of 29 megajoules per kilogram, comparable to that of coal.

According to a press release, the new process should work on any high-moisture organic wastes, such as food waste, sewage sludge, and agricultural residues. “We plan to expand the technology to various types of high-moisture organic waste and further optimize the process for industrial-scale commercialization,” said Taejun Park, lead author of the study.

Source: Taejun Park et al. Rapid conversion of wet spent coffee grounds into high-calorific biochar via drying-free flame plasma pyrolysis for process intensification. Chemical Engineering Journal, 2026.

 

 

Sometimes a big story can be told with a very small object.

Take the hazards of plastic pollution in the ocean, and a single bottle cap floating in the Pacific Ocean near Japan.

Captured in a net by scientists aboard a Japanese research vessel in 2023, this plastic cap had been transformed into a tiny ecosystem of hundreds of creatures. Through careful detective work, scientists unraveled a journey that brought the cap, and its stowaways from tropical waters far to the south.

The discovery, detailed in a new paper in Marine Pollution Bulletin, underscores the ways in which life is adapting to an increasingly plastic-filled ocean, and the potential for buoyant, virtually indestructible bits of trash to serve as rafts for invasive species.

“We found organisms that normally live in southern tropical waters,” said Naoto Jimi, the lead author and a scientist at Nagoya University. “Geographic range extensions of some species may be occurring under the radar.”

The potential for ocean-borne plastic to act as a raft for enterprising species has been a concern for some time. Famously, Japanese flotsam from a 2011 tsunami washed ashore in North America bearing nearly 300 coastal species. Scientists have surmised that tiny floating islands of plastic in the middle of the ocean are creating novel ecosystems of their own.

In the case of the bottle cap, that ecosystem was just 35 millimeters in diameter. Despite its small size, when scientists inspected the cap they discovered a little world inhabited by 307 individual organisms representing 9 different taxa. Perhaps most impressive was a Eunice bipapillata, a type of polychaete. This particular species of bottom-dwelling worm resembles a millipede with a slender, flat ribbon of a body lined by dozens of short legs.

 

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The worm had built a protective mucus shell, which in turn offered a landscape to be colonized by a marine menagerie, what the scientists described as “a miniature reef.” The residents’ identities provided some clue about the cap’s distant origins. The worm normally is found in the tropical western Pacific.

A closer analysis of some of the organisms offered a more detailed account of their travels. The shells of foraminifera, tiny organisms commonly known as forams, provide a temperature record of the surrounding ocean water in which different parts of the shell are made, much like tree rings vary from year to year depending on rainfall. Scientists can measure ratios of two isotopes of oxygen in the parts of the shell to determine water temperature.

Two of the foram shells revealed a movement from warmer to cooler waters, with a peak of nearly 30°C down to around 22°C – roughly the water temperature where the cap was caught.

The scientists traced the movement with still more detail by using a computer model of regional ocean currents. Simulations of a tiny object dropped in the ocean arriving at the spot where it was caught revealed a likely origin in the Philippines, a journey of some 70 days and more than 1,500 kilometers. That route was a match for marks on the cap, tracing to a Philippine beverage brand.

The findings illustrate that “the marine plastic problem should therefore be considered not only from the perspectives of aesthetic damage, ingestion, and entanglement, but also from those of biogeography and invasive species risk,” said Jimi.

With an estimated 30 million metric tons of plastic already floating in the ocean, and more arriving every day, that’s a lot of bottle caps waiting to be turned into mini-reefs.

Jimi, et. al. “Multi-proxy reconstruction of bottle-cap rafting using biofouling communities, stable isotopes and drift modeling.” Marine Pollution Bulletin. July 7, 2026.

Photo: Inside a 3.5 cm plastic bottle cap: A miniature ecosystem of 307 organisms drifted from the Philippines to waters south of Japan.© Sugashima Marine Biological Laboratory, Nagoya University

A variety of climate action strategies improve people’s quality of life, including strategies that require people to shift their behavior to use less energy, according to a new analysis. The study challenges the conventional wisdom that fighting climate change imposes a burden on the public—and offers a hopeful message about people’s willingness to engage.

In the past, most of the debate about policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has centered on cost versus amount of carbon saved. The new study adds quality of life as a third, previously overlooked dimension to the picture.

Researchers used computer simulations of national energy systems to evaluate how six different climate mitigation strategies affect various aspects of quality of life, performing this analysis for 18 countries.

They analyzed one so-called “supply-side” strategy focused on replacing fossil energy with clean technologies and one “demand-side” strategy involving reduced use of energy and materials for each of three major economic sectors: transport, buildings, and industry.

Until now, most research on climate mitigation has emphasized supply-side strategies, in part because of an assumption that demand-side measures would make people’s lives more difficult and thus be unpopular.

That’s not the case. All six climate strategies improve overall quality of life, the researchers found.

Both high-income and low- to middle-income countries see quality-of-life benefits from climate action, challenging the usual narrative that fighting climate change pits countries’ interests against each other. “Framing the climate change mitigation conversation around quality of life could break political stalemates” arising from this mistaken assumption, the researchers write.

 

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The researchers analyzed six different dimensions of quality of life—household income, jobs, health, energy security, fairness, and environmental conditions. Demand-side interventions perform slightly better across a wider range of quality-of-life aspects, the researchers found.

The best performers overall are demand-side interventions: reducing energy use in buildings by beefing up insulation and tweaking thermostat settings, and shifting car trips to other modes of transport like public transit, walking, and cycling.

The researchers also surveyed between 800 and 1,400 residents in three of the countries—the Netherlands, Brazil, and China—making the study one of only a few studies that have provided both objective and subjective data on the quality-of-life dimension of climate action.

In all three countries, people were open to both supply-side and demand-side climate strategies, and expected both to improve their quality of life. “People evaluate demand-side strategies positively, even if there is a tendency to evaluate supply-side strategies even more positively,” the researchers write.

What’s more, sharing evidence about the quality-of-life impacts of the six climate strategies tends to increase people’s support for them, the researchers found.

Overall, the findings suggest that in designing climate policy and selling it to the public, policymakers should emphasize well-being, not just cost-effectiveness—and they shouldn’t shy away from proposing demand-side measures, the researchers say.

Source: Grubler A. et al. “The undervalued quality-of-life benefits of demand-side energy and climate strategies.” Communications Sustainability 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.

 

By 2050, Scotland could reduce its meat intake by 35%, just by tweaking the diets of its highest meat consumers, a new study has found. This more targeted approach, instead of a country-wide change, was found to not only curb emissions but also cut health problems, reducing individual cases of diabetes and cardiovascular disease by tens of thousands. 

Of all UK countries, Scotland stands out because emissions from food consumption exceed those of the agricultural sector overall. This strikingly large footprint is probably due to Scotland’s heavy reliance on food imports, and it was the jumping off point for the scientists’ work.

To investigate, they looked at Scotland’s dietary intake, then used datasets to track the environmental impact of those diets, ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to water use. With this information in place, they compared 33 ways to achieve the recommendations of the UK Climate Change Committee, a body suggesting that UK countries reduce meat and dairy consumption by 20% by 2030, rising to 35% by 2050, in order to reach its climate goals. 

The explored measures ranged from reducing all types of meat consumption across the whole Scottish population, to limiting just red meat consumption only in some groups, and reducing dairy intake alone. The measures also looked at replacing animal proteins with alternatives like beans, eggs, and plant-based dairy alternatives. 

Of the 33 possible pathways, the one that really stood out involved reducing meat consumption only amongst Scotland’s biggest meat consumers—those consuming more than 70 grams of red meat per day. This measure proposed a reasonable change: that individuals limit only their red meat intake to 31g per person per day, and cut dairy intake by 20%, to achieve the 2050 goal. This involved reducing animal protein without replacing it with alternatives, as this population is already consuming more protein than healthy diets require. 

 

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With these targeted dietary changes, Scotland could bring down individual greenhouse gas emissions by 1.06 kg of CO2-equivalent per day, which made it the single most effective dietary pathway to reducing carbon footprints. The health benefits were also striking: over 10 years it would reduce cases of diabetes and cardiovascular disease by almost 60,000 and 20,000 respectively. This one dietary change would also reduce deaths over this period by an estimated 2,240. Diets would also be cheaper, by roughly £0.41 per day.

While the targeted population measure was the most effective all-round, other approaches achieved large environmental and health gains, too. All accomplished significant net reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Across the board, meat consumption was the biggest driver of environmental impact, and therefore where the biggest opportunities lay to cut emissions down. Meat consumption could invariably be replaced by other proteins with no impact on nutritional values, and most of the alternative 33 diets were cheaper than the standard diet—except for one where red meat was replaced by oily fish and cost a little more per day.

Nevertheless, identifying a single most effective measure to bring down Scotland’s meat consumption can be a helpful starting point for policymakers. On this note, the study shares two further clues: that Scotland’s highest meat consumers tend to eat more traditional beef-based dishes and meat sandwiches. When it comes to shifting the nation’s dietary footprint, these could be “an effective place to start,” the researchers write.

Kennedy et. al. “Reduced meat and dairy consumption improves health, environmental and most nutritional outcomes without increasing diet costs among Scottish adults.” Nature Food. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Whales, dolphins and porpoises are protected from hunting in most places these days. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe from fishing.

Accidental entanglement and drowning, often called bycatch, is one of the greatest threats to cetaceans. The overwhelming majority of those incidents were tied to gillnets, curtains of virtually invisible nylon mesh dangled in the water, indiscriminately trapping anything that swims into them.

The carnage is worldwide. In the Indian Ocean, an estimated 4.1 million small cetaceans such as dolphins died between 1950 and 2018 in gillnets targeting tuna. Gillnets have pushed Mexico’s vaquita porpoise to the brink of extinction. In U.S. waters, the nets claimed more than 6,000 marine mammals every year in the 1990s.

But for at least some gillnets, the solution might be easily at hand in the nearest trash can. Plastic drink bottles tethered to drift nets cut bycatch of an endangered South American dolphin by nearly 90% without affecting the overall amount of fish caught, according to new research in Marine Mammal Science.

“This is a good news story and something that we strive for—a simple solution that benefits both dolphins and the fishers who use the gear,” said Per Berggren, a marine conservation scientist at the United Kingdom’s Newcastle University who developed the idea of using the bottles. “Attaching plastic bottles to fishing nets can reduce dolphin bycatch globally and is something that every fisher can afford.”

 

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The arrangement is remarkably low-tech, taking advantage of the acoustic properties of air-filled bottles and the hunting strategies of dolphins. Slender-snouted franciscana dolphins, which grow to a little less than 2 meters, pursue fish close to shore in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. That puts them in direct conflict with small scale fishers, who sink their nets to the seafloor.

The dolphins use echolocation to survey their surroundings, emitting a series of clicks and then interpreting the sounds reflected back to them. The air-filled bottles act a bit like mirrors, reflecting the clicks better than the fine mesh of the nets.

The researchers attached the small bottles every 130 meters along the upper edge of nets that totaled 3 kilometers in length, like wide-spaced Christmas lights. Working with fishers in southern Brazil, between 2020 and 2025 they tracked what came up in the bottle-festooned nets compared to regular nets.

The results showed a dramatic 88% fewer dolphins caught in the bottle-topped nets when adjusted for the total amount of time each set of nets were in the water. In the modified nets, just one franciscana dolphin was caught, compared to eight franciscana dolphins and two bottlenose dolphins in the standard nets.

At the same time, there was no significant change in the number of fish caught in the nets, meaning there was little downside to the bottles.

“This is genuinely recycling that rescues dolphins,” said Berggren.

That doesn’t mean this is a silver bullet for all bycatch problems. Similar experiments in Zanzibar and Peru with gillnets that float near the surface didn’t produce the same benefits, according to a companion paper in Fisheries Research. Berggren suspects that’s because the surface water is a “noisier” environment, obscuring the presence of the bottles.

There are fancier devices that might overcome some of the weaknesses of the plastic bottles. For instance, there are electronic devices that can be attached to nets that emit a “ping.” But the researchers note that the cost of buying and maintaining them might be deterring small-scale local fishers from adopting them.

Empty plastic bottles, on the other hand, are all too abundant.

Sucunza, et. al. “Evidence of Dolphin Bycatch Reduction With Upcycled Plastic Bottles Acoustic Reflectors Attached to Bottom-Set Gillnets.” Marine Mammal Science. May 18, 2026.  

Berggren, et. al. “Upcycled glass and plastic bottles offer potential low-cost mitigation to megafauna bycatch in gillnet fisheries.” Fisheries Science. May 9, 2026.

Image: © Yaroslaf | Dreamstime.com

A household-scale “nanogrid” with direct current (DC) wiring could trim electricity use by almost a tenth compared to a conventional alternating current (AC) household system, according to a new analysis. The study combines computer simulation, laboratory testing, and rare real-life field data to provide some initial clues about the best opportunities to use DC power in a decarbonized energy system.

The power grid that connects homes and businesses to electricity is built on AC wiring, the result of infrastructure decisions made about a century ago. But most household electrical items, from lighting to computers to kitchen appliances, run on DC.

“This setup requires many conversions between DC and AC, all of which lose some energy,” says study team member Kevin Kircher, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana. They also require additional devices such as inverters and rectifiers with the attendant use of critical materials like copper and aluminum.

As the push to “electrify everything” proceeds, those inefficiencies add up, prompting a growing number of researchers to analyze the potential of a streamlined all-DC setup. “We investigated the alternative of connecting natively DC devices through DC wiring,” Kircher says.

One of the most important such devices is a heat pump, a heating and cooling system that represents a big chunk of energy use in all-electric households. “I was surprised by how hard it was to find an off-the-shelf heat pump that could run on DC right out of the box. It was impossible, actually!” Kircher says. “While many heat pumps use DC under the hood, manufacturers configure them to plug into conventional AC outlets.”

So the researchers retrofitted a commercially available household heat pump, which they tested under controlled laboratory conditions. They also installed a retrofitted heat pump in an all-DC “test house” inhabited by a trio of Purdue graduate students. The researchers say it is the first laboratory test of the heating function of a DC-based household heat pump, and the first field test of such a device.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:The Future of the Grid Could Be Parked in Your Driveway

 

Both laboratory and field test data show that a conventional off-the-shelf heat pump can be retrofit to run on DC without loss of performance. The researchers then fed their laboratory and field test data into a model of a DC-based household nanogrid consisting of a rooftop solar array, a storage battery, and a heat pump. With a retrofitted DC heat pump, the system would use 8% less energy over the course of a year compared the same setup with an off-the-shelf, AC-configured heat pump. A heat pump designed to run on DC wiring would yield 9.2% annual energy savings.

These savings correspond to 12.5% and 16.7% lower annual energy costs, respectively, according to the model.

“With a relatively simple retrofit, homeowners with solar power could better utilize their system’s generated power,” and save on their electric bill—just by switching their heat pump to DC, says study team member and Purdue graduate student Aaron Farha.

In monetary terms, however, the savings work out to only about $60 per year. At those rates, it probably wouldn’t make financial sense for people to retrofit individual homes or heat pumps to run on DC power. Nor are we likely to be uprooting the whole AC-based distribution grid anytime soon.

“The important part is that in some ways these systems can live in tandem to each other over the long term,” Farha says. “AC power lines are still an efficient way to transmit power over long distances, and DC power works best when paired with on-site photovoltaics and electric batteries.”

And the energy savings identified in the study could be persuasive for installing DC in new construction or pursuing retrofits of bigger buildings. “There’s a global community working on DC technologies at various scales,” Kircher says. “In my mind the most important direction for work right now is to identify applications where DC makes economic sense.”

Source: Farha A.H.P. et al. “Laboratory and field testing of a residential heat pump retrofit for a DC solar nanogrid.” Applied Energy 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.

Within the soil, a group of unique microbes are working overtime to shield wild plants from salt stress. Now researchers have shown that those naturally-occurring microbes can be successfully transferred to a range of crops and, crucially, can boost their growth.

The obliging microbe, a type of bacteria called Pseudomonas, was identified lurking around the roots of plants exposed to high salt levels, a situation expected to grow worse as climate change causes rising sea levels that push salty water further inland from the coast. 

Researchers on a new Science Advances paper observed that while other bacterial colonies died off under salty conditions, Pseudomonas microbes continued to thrive around the roots of wild soybean plants. They think this is because the bacteria contain specialized genes, and it suggests that the microbes hold a competitive advantage under salty conditions. 

On a hunch, they isolated samples of these resilient specimens and set about testing how well they did in other crops. 

They found that when they inoculated the roots of several crops with these bacteria, the microbes thrived almost universally. Particularly around salt-stressed sorghum, maize, tomato and rapeseed, Pseudomonas populations grew significantly, increasing from 22% to 41%, compared to just 1% to 21% in the control experiments. They weren’t a good match for every crop: populations of Pseudomonas did not flourish around rice and wheat plants, for example.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:What doesn't kill a soil microbe makes it stronger

 

Recalling the abundance of this microbe around wild soybean plants, the researchers then focused on what it could do for the economically-important and widespread domesticated soybean.

They found that not only did the bacteria swiftly colonize soybean roots—their numbers rising twofold under salt stress—but compared to controls the inoculated soybeans also experienced a significant growth boost under salty conditions, developing considerably longer roots and also forming more lateral ones. The soybeans showed increased salt tolerance in greenhouse experiments, and in open field experiments too. 

The question is how the microscopic soil residents seemed to be facilitating this remarkable resilience in plants, something the researchers still don’t have a full answer to. But further investigation gave them some clues—particularly as they noticed that lignin levels in the cell walls of inoculated soybeans increased by between 30 and 35% under salt stress, compared to non-inoculated plants. 

Lignin is an ingredient that increases stability and support in plant tissues, and the researchers theorize that something about the Pseudomonas microbes triggers enhanced lignin synthesis in plants, which shields them against rising salt. 

Next steps are to uncover precisely how the microbes do this. With that information in place, these bacteria may become a tiny but crucial key to future crop survival, the researchers say. “If scientists can harness this natural process, it could mark the beginning of a new era in climate-resilient agriculture.”

Zheng et. al. “Pseudomonads associated to salt-stressed plantsfacilitate stress adaption of soybean through enhancedlignin biosynthesis.” Science Advances. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Hydrogen is a promising clean-burning fuel for trucks, ships, and airplanes. The global demand for hydrogen has nearly doubled over the past two decades. But most hydrogen today does not come from a green source, over 95% comes from natural gas or as a byproduct of petrochemical processes.

At the same time, the world faces the environmental crisis of plastic waste. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have now come up with a practical solution for both problems.

They have made a device that uses sunlight to break down plastic waste and turn it into hydrogen. And it’s not just a lab curiosity. The team made it using simple methods and materials, and have tested it outside in the sunlight. “Converting waste streams into valuable products using clean energy sources is…an attractive strategy to address both energy and environmental concerns,” they write in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering.

The idea isn’t brand new. Chemistry professor Erwin Reisner and his team has been working on a way to do it for several years. Three years ago, they developed a solar-powered reactor that turns carbon dioxide and plastic waste into fuels and useful chemicals.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Researchers crack the code for economically turning plastic waste into fuel

 

That previous device relied on light-activated catalysts based on semiconductor materials. Making panels with such materials typically involves suspending the small particles in solution, depositing them onto a substrate and heating it. The process requires high temperatures and harsh chemicals, which limits scalability and increases cost and complexity. The older reactor was about 5 cm x 5 cm, and the researchers only tested it in the lab under simulated sunlight.

The new device is significantly larger—about one meter square—and the team has now tested it under natural sunlight outside Cambridge’s chemistry department. The researchers make the panels at room temperature using simple gear.

Using a common paint sprayer, they first spray the light-absorbing material onto a glass panel. Then they coat it with a second layer made of specially designed molecules containing cobalt and zirconium, which serve as the catalyst.

The reactor extracted hydrogen from cut-up plastic drink bottles, as well as from glucose and cellulose, which are found in plant biomass waste. Glucose produced the most hydrogen, while cellulose gave less.

The spray-coating method cuts the cost to produce the reactors significantly, which should make them easier to produce at scale. But the hydrogen right now is still too expensive. According to a press release, the researchers still need to improve the durability and efficiency of the reactors.

Source: Ariffin Bin Mohamad Annuar et al. Photoreforming of solid waste on 1 m2 scale using single-source precursor-derived co-catalyst films. Nature Chemical Engineering, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

In February of 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set off not just the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War. It also triggered an unprecedented experiment in how wars spill into the natural world.

As Russian armored vehicles poured into Ukraine, the contaminated land surrounding the defunct Chornobyl nuclear reactor turned from a massive de facto wildlife sanctuary into a battleground. By coincidence, the reaction of wildlife to this incursion was captured on more than two dozen motion-detection cameras set up the previous year to study lynx.

The resulting trove of images, which reached scientists after the Ukrainian military retook the territory in April 2022, offer a previously unseen look at how animals change behavior when their habitat becomes a war zone. The results, published in June in Science, show that the war did in fact alter the animals, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The findings point “to a broader transformation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone — away from an ecosystem that, in the absence of human disturbance, had recovered from the reactor disaster, toward a militarized landscape in which wildlife habitat use and behavior changed,” said University of Freiburg ecologist Marco Heurich, who took part in the research.

The results underscore yet another way that wars can take a toll on wildlife. This at a time when conflicts rage on many continents, including civil conflicts in places like Sudan and Myanmar, and attacks by one country on another in Ukraine, Lebanon, and Iran. While the human tragedy of such conflicts is most shocking, nature is also a casualty.

 

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The Chornobyl region had already witnessed more than its share of destruction at the hands of humans. The 1986 explosion of a nuclear reactor there had left the surrounding land tainted with radiation. But the accident also led to the creation of a 4,200 square kilometer zone largely off-limits to people, giving birth to an unexpected haven for wildlife. Wild boars, roe and red deer, wolves and moose flourished. Brown bears and lynx, once extinct from the region, returned.

In early 2021, scientists set out a network of camera traps aimed at studying the revived lynx population. A year later, Russian troops turned up, then were forced out by Ukrainian fighters. The timing meant the scientists had an unusual opportunity to compare how wildlife in 2021 behaved compared to the same time in 2022 when the war had begun.

The arrival of war fits within a broader body of research studying what is commonly called the “landscape of fear.” Scientists have delved into the ways animal behavior is altered when their habitat is perceived as being more perilous, often because a predator turns up. It could be guard dogs scaring off foxes, fish restricting where they graze on algae, or the smell of predators shifting antelope feeding habits.

It’s commonly thought that animals in a war zone will shift their movements more toward the nighttime. Darkness can off be quieter and makes it easier to move undetected.

In some animals, the researchers saw just that. Brown hares, for example, showed up more often in night camera shots. But just the opposite occurred for both red deer and red fox. “The decline in nighttime detections suggests that these species have shifted their activity to daytime hours in response to increased conflict intensity,” said Svitlana Kudrenko a former Freiburg Ph.D. student who led the research.

The cameras turned up other surprises. While bombs and gunfire might be expected to trigger animals to flee spots occupied by people, both lynx and red fox turned up close to human settlements more often during the occupation.

The researchers don’t offer explanations for this divergence in how different species responded to the war. And the occupation of Chornobyl was brief enough that it was impossible to see how these immediate behavioral changes might translate into broader ecological effects.

But with the war dragging, and some parts of the country reduced to front lines of devastation and violence, there are plenty of landscapes of fear where ecosystems are have been affected by the war for years, even if there are no cameras to capture it.

Kudrenko, et. al. “Changes in wildlife activity patterns in response to war in Ukraine.” Science. June 18, 2026.

Photo: Black storks and a grey heron resting on metal structures at the former cooling pond of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (June 2020) ©Kateryna Korepanova

Note on spelling: Many people are used to the “Chernobyl” spelling. But this paper spells it “Chornobyl.” The older spelling was Russian, and the new spelling is the internationally accepted one preferred by Ukraine.