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Ferdinand Ostrop/AP/Shutterstock 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 s...

Paulo Oliveira / Alamy The Australian lungfish has the largest genome of any animal so far sequenced. Siegfried Schloissnig at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Austria and his colleagues have found that the lungfish’s genome is 43 billion base pairs long, which is around 14 times larger than the human genome. Advertisement Its genome is 30 per cent larger than that of the previous record holder: the axolotl, a Mexican amphibian that the team sequenced in 2018. The researchers used high-powered computer sequencers to piece together the lungfish genome. To account for inherent...

A seagrass that forms lush underwater meadows can naturally trap plastic items in ball-shaped tangles and remove them from the seawater

AFP /AFP via Getty Images Authorities in Australia have responded swiftly to contain potential outbreaks of the UK variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19. On Thursday 7 January, a cleaner for a hotel quarantine facility in Brisbane tested positive for the more contagious B.1.1.7 variant, first sequenced in the UK in September, which has now reached at least 45 countries. Advertisement The variant has previously been detected in returning international passengers in hotel quarantine, but this is the first time someone had unknowingly been in the Australian community while potent...

ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images The highly contagious B.1.1.7. variant of the coronavirus, which was first detected in the UK, has officially reached 10 states in the US, but infectious disease experts say the true extent of its spread is unclear due to a lack of monitoring. Texas, Minnesota and New York are among the states that have detected the variant. Given it has been found in 10 states, it is likely to be present in more, says Lane Warmbrod at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Still, she says, “it is hard to know how widespread the variant is because we don’t have sufficient...