Amphibians are the world’s most threatened vertebrates, with 41% at risk of extinction. A new study, published in the open-access journal Nature Conservation, assessed the status of amphibians in Vietnam to improve their conservation. It found a high level of species richness and local endemism, with 28% of the country’s endemic species threatened with extinction. More than half of Vietnam’s endemic amphibians are reported exclusively from a single locality, which makes them especially vulnerable.

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and poultry producer Leong Hup Singapore Pte Ltd have jointly developed processes to repurpose waste materials from poultry farming. One of the key innovations include using the keratin from chicken feathers as a material for egg trays, serving as a biodegradable replacement for synthetic polymers, whose production, use, and disposal causes greenhouse gas emissions, as they are made from petroleum oil. The collaboration also resulted in another innovation – the successful conversion of biological waste from Leong Hup Singapore’s poultry farming, such as blood and bones, into an alternative and cost-effective culture medium that could be used to cultivate cell-based meat.

The Earth’s oceans are crisscrossed with roughly 1.2 million km of fiber optic telecommunication cables — enough to girdle the planet 30 times. Researchers have now succeeded in using a fiber in a submarine cable as a passive listening system, enabling them to listen to and monitor whales.

In a recent study, researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG), the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Bristol, and the Open University of the United Kingdom have reported exceptionally rich assemblages of plant spine fossils collected from late Eocene (about 39 million years ago) sediments in central Tibet.