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Feature Stories

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 31-Mar-2026 21:15 ET (1-Apr-2026 01:15 GMT/UTC)

JMIR news and perspectives: Combating misinformation, burnout, and environmental hazards

JMIR Publications

Our News & Perspectives section of the Journal of Medical Internet Research delivers grounded, expert-led insights from our network of correspondents. Recent articles explore how digital innovation is tackling modern health challenges, from combating online misinformation and physician burnout to advancing wildfire exposure tracking, aging in place, and the humanizing power of digital narrative medicine.

Journal: Journal of Medical Internet Research

What’s in your salad? Crops exposed to nanoplastics may boost heavy metal intake

Texas A&M University

New research from Texas A&M University shows that lettuce plants exposed to nanoplastics and cadmium, a toxic heavy metal, absorb up to 61% more cadmium into their edible leaves than plants exposed to cadmium alone.

Mizzou researchers sowing the seeds of agricultural and economic security

University of Missouri-Columbia

A University of Missouri researcher is developing a solution to improve soil health and meet the challenges posed by changing environmental and market conditions.

Caixia “Ellen” Wan, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, is hoping to make it easier for farmers to adjust as extreme weather events such as record-setting temperatures, flooding and prolonged drought threaten the productivity of conventional agriculture operations.

Unlocking the past: GenAI in library archival research

University of Victoria

As part of the University of Victoria Libraries’ Kula: Library Futures Academy, an open-source retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline is being developed using historic newspapers held in the archives. This combined with optical character recognition (OCR) technologies will better capture metadata from newspapers and produce information retrieval with generative AI to produce accurate, context-aware responses grounded in authoritative source material.

Five UT Arlington faculty named NAI Senior Members

University of Texas at Arlington

Five University of Texas at Arlington faculty members have been named Senior Members of the National Academy of Inventors, recognizing their outstanding achievements in innovation.

Consent and its discontents: The case of UK Biobank

Universiteit van Amsterdam

UK Biobank is a large biomedical database containing genetic, health, and lifestyle data from about 500,000 volunteers, intended to support health research in the public interest. Gulzaar Barn (philosophy department at the University of Amsterdam) argues that some uses of its data have strayed from these aims and may conflict with the consent participants gave. She claims that the broad consent model did not fully communicate all possible uses of the data, and that some approved projects (such as those by insurance companies or consumer genetic testing firms) may fall outside the database’s stated purpose.

Journal: Medicine Health Care and Philosophy

ReNeuron establishes new base at Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science in major research partnership

Swansea University

ReNeuron Group Limited, a leading UK biotechnology company, has joined Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science (ILS) in a new strategic research partnership to advance next-generation exosome therapies, helping transport medicines to the parts of the body where they are needed most.

From borrowing to becoming: Rethinking education in an age of AI

ECNU Review of Education

Despite several reforms by policymakers, investments, and sophisticated technologies, dissatisfaction with education systems persists. This review presents the challenges and provides a roadmap to enhance the education system in the age of AI. The author Yong Zhao highlights that education must move beyond borrowed solutions, narrow metrics, and automated fixes, and return to first principles. It is a call to resist reductionism and to recenter education on human growth, creativity, and responsibility.

Journal: ECNU Review of Education

Strengthening trust in a changing research landscape

IOP Publishing’s annual highlights report is out now. It was published on the March 4th. See below. The report includes key milestones across the organisation’s strategy, such as continued growth in open access publishing, with more than half (51%) of all research in 2025 published openly, underscoring IOPP’s commitment to making high quality scientific knowledge accessible to the world.

Fighting the red palm weevil to protect the first bite of Ramadan

Across the drylands where ICARDA works, Ramadan is widely observed as a month during which Muslims fast from dawn till dusk and gather each evening for iftar, the meal that breaks the fast. From Egypt to Morocco, Oman to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and beyond, millions begin that meal with a date, a highly nutritious fruit that holds significant religious and cultural importance. But if red weevil is not stopped, how long will this ancient tradition last?

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