A worm unlocks nature's own bioplastic, and a mushroom eases pain and sorrow

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology assumed only microorganisms could break that material back down, until they looked closely at Olavius algarvensis, a marine worm so specialized it has no mouth and no gut. It survives entirely on bacteria living under its skin. Researchers found an enzyme in the worm built specifically to crack open its bacterial partners' PHA reserves, made right where the worm digests them 5. Once they went looking elsewhere, the same enzyme family turned up in more than 66 species across nine phyla: earthworms, sponges, springtails, starfish. Lab tests confirmed even distantly related animals could do the same trick.

In mice with hypertension, an experimental compound called 17b woke those pathways back up. It lowered blood pressure only modestly, but it also reduced stiffness in the main aorta and cut down scarring in the heart and kidneys, the organ damage chronic inflammation leaves behind. Unlike broad anti-inflammatory drugs, which suppress the immune system wholesale, compound 17b works by flipping switches called formylpeptide receptors that tell immune cells to stand down.

They gave mice chronic pain through nerve injury or inflammation, waited until the mice showed both physical hypersensitivity and depression-like withdrawal, then gave a single injection of psilocybin. By the next day, the pain sensitivity had fully reversed. So had the mood symptoms. The effect lasted at least twelve days, the full length of the study. In a two-room preference test, mice with chronic pain chose to spend their time in the room where they'd received the drug, evidence the relief wasn't just reflexive but genuinely felt.

Commerce minister Gamal Hassan calls business "booming," and new construction near the airport district has grown noticeably denser by satellite imagery. Beydan Coffee, a pan-African chain founded by a Somali returnee, is thriving nearby. Nobody has a single clean explanation for the drop in attacks; the government credits pushing al-Shabab out, while researchers point to more mundane tools, spreading CCTV cameras, an electronic database police use with iPads to check cars at checkpoints, and a larger plainclothes intelligence presence.

The perovskite panels generated 3.42% more electricity per unit of capacity in March, 3.79% more in April, and 5.81% more in May, the gap widening as it got hotter, exactly when silicon efficiency typically sags. Their fix for the usual failure point, microscopic surface flaws that leak charge, was a new solvent recipe combining three liquids that lets a protective layer of formamidinium iodide form naturally, then sealing it with organic lead-carboxylate salts that coat evenly without needing an inert-gas factory line.

Labels alone cut the average shopping basket's emissions by 5.6%. A £60-per-tonne carbon tax on the worst offenders nearly doubled that, a 10% cut, though at a cost of £79 a year per person. A gentler £28 tax paired with labeling matched the same 10% reduction for less than half that cost, £34 a year, equivalent to 4.7% of the UK's entire national emissions. The people who cut back hardest were the biggest meat buyers, dropping consumption twice as much as light meat eaters once they saw the number attached.

Lead author Timo Metz found that cleared rainforest, left alone with no replanting and no restoration budget, recovers 75% of its species composition and 90% of its species diversity within about 30 years. Birds and bats move back in almost immediately, as soon as vegetation thickens enough to perch in. Soil bacteria, specialist insects, and full-canopy trees take much longer, sometimes decades more. Co-author Nico Blüthgen's team found the animals aren't just following the forest's return, they're driving it: bats and monkeys haul in seeds, dung beetles bury them, birds pollinate what grows.