When it comes to recycling, not all plastics are equal. While the world still struggles to manage recycling streams for simple plastics like PET, manufacturers have been developing increasingly complex plastic mixtures. Fortunately, new techniques like STRAP show great potential to solve more complex recycling issues.

Stings from Australia’s Dendrocnide species of plants cause pain lasting for months. In a new study, Gilding and colleagues have now found out how – these plants secrete neurotoxins that resemble spider venom, interrupting your body’s signals and making sure you never want to touch one ever again.

Body temperature has decreased in high-income populations in the last two centuries, calling into question the famous 37°C guideline for normal body temperature. However, a new study shows a significant decrease in body temperature occurred also in a tropical population inhabiting a low-income pathogen-rich environment, raising new questions about the cause of this change.

Extreme melt years are occurring more often than ever for glaciers around the world. We make it possible to measure the impact of climate change on this melt. We show that the extreme melt of New Zealand glaciers in 2018 was at least ten times more likely to have happened as a result of climate change.

The ever-increasing amount of digital data has led scientists to look for new ways of storing information efficiently. In the last years, a new field of research has evolved around storing information in the sequence of DNA molecules. We have shown a new approach, which allows us to encode data in DNA and store it in everyday objects like coffee cups, reading glasses or 3D-printed bunnies.

Plants need gravity as a constant landmark for shoots to grow upward and roots downward. We have identified a novel mechanism allowing plants to partially defy the influence of gravity on the lateral roots allowing them to spread horizontally. In the future this will enable us to engineer the root system for specific needs of breeders and farmers.