A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends that the U.S. establish a nationally coordinated and expanded monitoring system to track plastic pollution in order to understand the scale and sources of the U.S. plastic waste problem, set reduction and management priorities, and measure progress in addressing it.

By using synthetic biology, scientists are working to isolate and cultivate strains of coral that can naturally withstand higher sea surface temperatures associated with climate change.

A report by FAO’s Global Soil Partnership and its Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, and the European Commission presents the state of knowledge on soil biodiversity, the threats to it, and the solutions that soil biodiversity can provide to problems in different fields.

Researchers in Brussels will collect 10,000 samples of underground fungal networks over the next 18 months from around the world, using machine learning to seek out the most biodiverse hotspots and map global fungal networks.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is accepting comments on a proposed rule which would allow the agency to amend its procedures of determining if a premarket notification for a food contact substance (FCN) is no longer effective.