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Microplastic fibres may be as damaging to soil ecosystems as drought.
Yudi Lozano at the Free University of Berlin and her colleagues suspected that microplastics may affect interactions between soil and water, so they examined the impact on grassland soils.
The researchers collected dry loam soil – which consists mainly of sand and silt – and mixed in polyester microfibres that were 1.28 millimetres in length. They planted seven grassland plant species in the soil, keeping some of the plants well-watered and growing others in drought-like conditions.
To simulate a moderately …
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The Doctor vs. #MeToo
How an HIV specialist in Germany is using media law to erase reporting of sexual abuse allegations against him
One day in June 2019, Juliane Löffler was at her desk in
BuzzFeed Germany’s Berlin office when a notification popped up on Slack. A colleague had sent her a link to a Facebook post that was circulating online. In the post, a prominent figure of Berlin’s queer scene revealed that his doctor had assaulted him. It was time, he wrote, to break the silence. Löffler, a reporter who covers the LGBTQ community, noticed that although the doctor wasn’t named, many people in the comments seemed to know who he was. Then she saw that several people had written that the same thing had happened to them. Löffler began making inquiries. A few weeks later, she ran into Thomas Vorreyer, a political reporter at