Several hundred thousand chemicals are considered as potentially environmentally relevant. Scientists from the RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany show that monitoring data for surface waters are only available for a very small fraction of these chemicals. In their article, published in the latest issue of Science, the authors also demonstrate that the environmental risks of highly toxic chemicals might be overlooked, because these chemicals affect ecosystems at concentrations that cannot be detected on a regular basis.

Currently, the main method of combatting CoTS outbreaks is by manually culling each starfish one-by-one, which is highly inefficient, labor-intensive, and costly. But now, a team of researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan have discovered that CoTS use their characteristic spines to ‘smell’ peptides and communicate with one another, even outside mating seasons. Building on this finding, the team has created a synthetic peptide that consistently attracts CoTS at very low concentrations and with no toxicity. The results are published in iScience. Their discovery could lead to the further development of potent pest-management peptides – dubbed Acanthaster attractins – that prompts the starfish to congregate at one spot, enabling the efficient removal of many CoTS in one sweep.

A sweeping new analysis finds that rising global temperatures will dampen the world’s capacity to produce food from most staple crops, even after accounting for economic development and adaptation by farmers.

What has been the trajectory of water erosion model research in China? What are the most widely used models currently? What are the characteristics of research distribution across different regions? What shortcomings need urgent attention? Professor Qingfeng Zhang from Northwest A&F University, along with researchers from multiple institutions, systematically reviewed the research progress of water erosion models in China from 1982 to 2022 using a combination of bibliometric and statistical analysis methods, providing a panoramic perspective to answer these questions. Relevant study has been published in the journal Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2024580).

Professor Xinzhang Song (Zhejiang A&F University) et al. conducted a study that revealed the response of soil CO₂ emissions in bamboo forests of humid regions to straw mulching and its long-term effects. The research found that straw mulching not only significantly increased soil carbon emissions in the short term but also had enduring effects that persisted for at least three years after the removal of the mulching material. The study has been published in the journal Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2025607).