Converting crop straw into stable soil organic matter (SOM) is essential for sustainable farming and climate resilience—but it's notoriously inefficient in saline-alkaline soils. 

Arsenic contamination in rice is a growing food safety concern in Asia. A new study presents a cost-effective, sustainable solution using silicon extracted from rice husks. 

Antibiotic residues in livestock manure can make waste treatment more difficult and may increase environmental risks linked to antibiotic resistance. Now, researchers have shown that a seaweed-based hydrochar modified with cobalt can help anaerobic digestion systems convert chicken manure containing high levels of sulfadimethazine into more methane while also reducing antibiotic residues and resistance genes.

Agricultural plastics help farmers grow crops more efficiently, but they also create a difficult waste problem when they become tangled with plant residues after harvest. A study published in Biochar suggests that one promising solution may be to convert plastic-contaminated crop waste into biochar, a carbon-rich material that can improve soil quality and help reduce heavy metal risks in contaminated farmland.

A new study highlights the surprising potential of rice-fish coculture (RFC) to naturally increase phosphorus (P) availability in paddy soils—without the need for added fertilizers. 

Immune checkpoint inhibitors are widely used in elderly cancer patients, but data on tumor-specific immune-related adverse events (irAEs) remain limited. A Chinese Medical Journal study analyzed 407 elderly patients with gastrointestinal (GI) tumors or lung cancer. Results showed higher irAE incidence in lung cancer patients, skin toxicity more prevalent in GI tumor patients, and thyroid dysfunction more common in lung cancer patients. This study provides evidence for personalized safety management of immunotherapy in elderly patients.

Long-term conservation tillage (CT) is transforming the way soil microbes responsible for nitrogen fixation behave and interact. 

A new study published in Big Earth Data develops a stochastic random forest (RF) classifier to predict extreme wind-gust (WG) occurrences along the western Mediterranean coast by integrating instantaneous and trailing 24-hour meteorological variables across multiple height levels, enabling the model to capture both short-term evolution and immediate atmospheric forcing. It demonstrates strong forecasting performance with high precision, low false-alarm rates, and reliable uncertainty estimation, while identifying barometric-pressure tendencies and humidity as key predictors, highlighting the framework’s potential for early-warning systems, climate resilience, and disaster-risk management. UERRA reanalysis data can be downloaded from the Copernicus Climate Data Store platform: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/. Supplementary materials supporting the findings of this study are openly accessible at the public GitHub repository: https://github.com/AI4OCEANS/.

Clay minerals have long been thought too large for plant absorption, but new research turns that assumption on its head. 

Microbes beneath our feet quietly orchestrate the health of ecosystems, but their seasonal rhythms remain a mystery—especially in coastal wetlands.