Marine animals have spent hundreds of millions of years evolving short protein fragments that fight microbes, calm inflammation, and tame tumors. A new review in the Chinese Journal of Natural Medicines maps how researchers are finally catching up: extracting these peptides at scale, decoding their structures with high-resolution mass spectrometry, and using AI to predict which ones might become drugs. The global market for marine peptides already tops USD 310 million, and the authors argue the next wave of therapies for hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and drug-resistant infections may come from the bottom of the food chain.

A new international study quantifies, for the first time, how data losses in ocean monitoring would severely degrade the ocean heat estimates that underpin weather prediction, El Niño forecasting, and fisheries management.

Cadmium contamination in paddy soils is a serious global food safety concern, threatening the health of millions who rely on rice as a staple. While cleaning up contaminated soil is often impractical, a team of scientists has demonstrated an effective and agronomically simple alternative: spraying rice leaves with a solution of tiny, engineered carbon dots (CDs).

In a field experiment on moderately cadmium-contaminated soil, researchers from the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences and Jiangnan University applied CDs to rice canopies. The application produced remarkable results. The higher-dose treatment not only reduced the cadmium accumulated in the rice grains by 46% but also increased the overall grain yield by 18%, all without harming the grain's nutritional quality.