PIK_climate (@[email protected])

“If food system emissions are not reigned in, we cannot reach the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement,” explains PIK scientist Franziska Funke. Global trends in meat production are unsustainable, and taxes may be the most effective way to curb the world’s appetite, she and other researchers underline. Meats, including beef, pork, and chicken, are “significantly underpriced” compared with the cost of their environmental impact, they concluded in a study last year. ($) https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/10/13/science/meat-tax-climate-change/

Tips, Tools and Resources: From neurodivergent scientists for neurodivergent scientists

As part of an initiative aiming to amplify the stories of neurodivergent scientists, eLife invites neurodivergent people to use this form to share tips, tools and resources that they use or have designed to improve their experience as a neurodivergent researcher. These submissions will be collated in this publicly available list, for the benefit of other researchers in the community. What counts as a “tip, tool or resource”? Submissions may include - but are not limited to: online resources you’ve found helpful supportive communities you belong to apps, software or objects you use regularly strategies you've adopted or created for yourself to tackle certain tasks, These tips may be useful for work (e.g. writing, reading/reviewing the literature, experiments, fieldwork etc.), but also for day-to-day life, advocacy, well-being, or finding a community. Who can submit a contribution? We welcome contributions from all neurodivergent individuals with research experience, regardless of diagnosis status or form of neurodivergence. We especially encourage submissions which may be primarily relevant for neurodivergent researchers from underrepresented and/or under-diagnosed communities. Your contribution will be completely anonymous, including to eLife. What will eLife do with my submission? Submissions are collated in this publicly available list within a few days of you completing the form — please help us share it widely! eLife may at some point compile this information into a short blogpost which will be freely accessible and under a CC-BY licence. Please note that all contributions will be reviewed before being listed (for example, we cannot accept self-promotion of paid services), and some may be lightly edited (e.g. to remove identifying information). Important note: We acknowledge that the resources collected via this form cannot address the structural issues that neurodivergent scientists may be facing in and outside of academia. This initiative should not detract from the need for institutional and policy changes, or suggest that the focus should be solely on individuals trying to ‘manage themselves’. Still, we hope that a few of these crowd-sourced strategies may be helpful and valuable to some in the short-term. By providing a place for neurodivergent scientists to safely share these snippets of their lives, we hope that others will feel less isolated in their experiences, and that they will be encouraged to design or embrace the strategies they find useful for themselves.

Fungi that break down hardwood trees can do the same with plastic, study shows

A team of plant and molecular biologists from the University of Kelaniya and the University of Peradeniya, both in Sri Lanka, reports that many types of fungi that break down hardwood trees can also break down polyethylene, a common kind of plastic. In their study, reported in PLOS ONE, the group tested 21 species of hardwood-decaying fungi in their lab.

Details | Working at Bristol | University of Bristol

AlphaFold works with other AI tools to go from target to hit molecule in 30 days

End-to-end AI drug discovery process predicts potential inhibitors for a protein implicated in liver cancer