US Food and Drug Administration rejects petition to set Pfas limits in food
9 July 2026 - The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on toxic Pfas ''forever chemical'' in food, marking another setback for public health advocates' push to limit exposures to the dangerous compounds. (more)

UK: We found microplastics in hedgehogs -- then we traced them back to pet food
25 June 2026 - When Emily Thrift, PhD Candidate and Doctoral Tutor in Ecology at the University of Sussex, and colleagues found microplastics in hedgehog droppings, they wanted to know where they were coming from. One answer was surprisingly close to home: pet food. Despite being one of Britain's best-loved wild animals, and now officially listed as ''near threatened'', no one knew hedgehogs were ingesting microplastics. (more)

Four days of extreme rain killed 7 percent of world's rarest orangutans, study says
24 June 2026 - Four days of extreme rain and landslides in the Indonesian island of Sumatra have pushed the world's most endangered great apes even closer to extinction, says a study. (more)

David Miliband, International Rescue Committee President: It's a new world disorder
5 June 2026 - ''It's what we call a new world disorder: 60 wars, 120 million people -- refugees and displaced, 300 million people hungry, plus another 45 million according to the World Food Program as a result of the constrictions in the Strait of Hormuz. That's a disordered world. And people can inveigh against international institutions as much as they like, but the problem we're facing is not that there's too strong an international system -- it's too weak.'' (more)

Researchers issue warning about tech that could turn every router 'into a potential means for surveillance'
25 May 2026 - Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany say ordinary WiFi networks can be used to identify people with an eerie amount of accuracy. (more)

What is Ebola and why is stopping the latest outbreak so difficult?
21 May 2026 - An Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been declared a public health emergency of international concern, by the World Health Organization (WHO). The latest outbreak is challenging because it involves a rare species of Ebola for which there is no vaccine, and the epicenter is in an area affected by conflict. (more)

Seasonal patterns that farmers trusted for generations have suddenly turned unpredictable
18 May 2026 - Farmers in Jambhali, a village of 5,000 in western India, have long turned to 80-year-old Satgonda Patil for advice on when to plant or harvest their crops. For more than six decades, his deep knowledge and uncanny instincts helped him and his neighbors succeed and avoid weather-related losses. That started to change about five years ago. Rains arrived late, then early. Summers stretched on longer, and pests appeared at unfamiliar times. Financial losses soon followed. (more)

Lack of big tech transparency hides reality of data center environmental costs
8 May 2026 - Data centers are estimated to use hundreds of billions of liters of water and emit millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year, but a new article published in Patterns found that a lack of transparent reporting from tech companies means that the true environmental impacts are likely significantly underestimated. (more)