A major new digital mapping project could help safeguard some of the world's most important and well-known heritage sites from rising seas, flooding and coastal erosion.

Researchers have created the Global Coastal Heritage (Glo-CoH) dataset, the first comprehensive digital map of UNESCO World Heritage sites located along coastlines that are less than 20 metres above sea level.

An international research team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) investigated how the shape of black corals influences the functions of their cilia. By combining an unusually comprehensive suite of imaging and microsensor techniques, the researchers were able to visualize both, water flow and oxygen transport, from individual cilia to entire coral fragments. They found that the cilia allow corals to create and direct the flow of water around and within them, thus optimising oxygen supply, feeding and internal transport. The study was recently published in Communications Biology.

Researchers developed a diffusion-based artificial intelligence system that learns ship navigation directly from real-world voyage data rather than relying on optimization algorithms. Trained on a vessel in Japan's busy and geographically complex Seto Inland Sea, the AI learned to balance multiple objectives simultaneously, including collision avoidance, efficient routing, and speed control. The AI also learned local navigation practices, such as staying within designated traffic lanes, without being explicitly programmed to do so. The study demonstrates that diffusion-based AI can capture human-like navigation behavior from real-world data, offering a promising new approach to autonomous ship navigation in complex maritime environments.

A new review study explores natural products containing atypical atoms, including boron, fluorine, arsenic, selenium, iodine, vanadium, and molybdenum. These metabolites reveal how nature’s biosynthetic repertoire extends beyond conventional biological elements, enabling unusual biosynthetic pathways, redox activity, detoxification, signaling, defense, and catalysis. The review highlights their ecological roles and future potential for drug discovery, genome mining, and sustainable biocatalysis.

New analysis shows that a ‘pause’ in Arctic winter sea ice decline seen in the early 2020s has ended following record lows in 2025 and early 2026.