GoSun, a solar technology company, is accepting deposits for its new EV solar charger. The device mounts onto the roof rack of the car, unfolds over the length of the electric vehicle and plugs into the charging port to turn solar energy into power for the car.
According to GoSun, the 1,100-watt charging device is ideal for providing enough power for daily commutes just with solar power, and it offers peace of mind for those with range anxiety over finding a charging station. The device is also designed to allow people to skip the lines and costs at public chargers when they just need a small power boost.
The charger doesn’t take the place of traditional EV charging infrastructure, but it can provide a boost of up to 20 miles per day. The company recommends keeping the panels clean and in direct sunlight to get the most energy possible, with the average amount provided ranging between 10 to 15 miles daily.
As Car and Driver reported, home charging remains one of the most affordable refueling options for vehicles, with costs coming in even lower than gas-powered cars. This can be especially true for areas that offer lower utility costs during non-peak hours.
However, for people living in multifamily housing or anyone that makes use of public chargers, charger access may be limited, and costs have been rapidly rising. According to Car and Driver, charging costs at Electrify America chargers has increased 30% and Tesla Supercharger rates have increased 38% to 112% from 2021 to 2024.
“Solar EV battery chargers supply a reputable, affordable, and green solution for electrical vehicle owners, specifically those who reside in apartment or condos or places without committed billing stations,” GoSun said on its website.
The solar charger mounts on any EV or hybrid, so long as it has a luggage or roof rack. The panels weigh 70 pounds, and take about 20 minutes for two people to install. When driving, the device is folded up and sits on the roof rack, and is designed to withstand harsh weather and driving speeds up to 100 miles per hour. When the car is parked and the device is unfolded for charging, the panels are designed to withstand winds up to 30 miles per hour.
GoSun
GoSun is accepting $100 deposits for the device, which will cost $2,999 in total. According to the product website, the solar charger may be eligible for up to 30% of the cost in federal tax credits along with locally available incentives.
GoSun expects deliveries of the chargers to begin sometime in 2025.
There are currently 169,420 species on the Red List, 47,187 of which face extinction, a press release from IUCN said. Recently added to the list are 482 fungi species, bringing their total to 1,300, at least 411 of which are threatened with extinction.
“Fungi are the unsung heroes of life on Earth, forming the very foundation of healthy ecosystems – yet they have long been overlooked. Thanks to the dedication of experts and citizen scientists, we have taken a vital step forward: over 1,000 of the world’s 155,000 known fungal species have now been assessed for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the most comprehensive source of information on extinction risk. Now, it’s time to turn this knowledge into action and safeguard the extraordinary fungal kingdom, whose vast underground networks sustain nature and life as we know it,” said IUCN Director General Dr. Grethel Aguilar in the press release.
Fungi habitats have been replaced by the rapid expansion of urban and agricultural areas, threatening 279 fungi species with extinction. Fertilizer runoff and engine pollution threaten an additional 91 species. In Europe, these are significant threats that impact well-known traditional countryside species like the fibrous waxcap (Hygrocybe intermedia), which is listed as vulnerable.
Illegal logging, deforestation for timber production and forest clearing for agriculture threaten at least 98 other fungi species.
“Clear-cutting of old-growth forests is especially damaging, destroying fungi that do not have time to re-establish with rotation forestry. Thirty per cent of old-growth pine forests across Finland, Sweden and Russia have been cut down since 1975, pushing species such as giant knight (Tricholoma colossus) to become Vulnerable,” IUCN said.
Climate change is also impacting fungi. More than 50 species are threatened with extinction in the United States because of changes in fire patterns, which have altered forest compositions. For example, the high Sierra Nevada mountains have become dominated by fir trees since 1980, reducing the habitat of endangered Gastroboletus citrinobrunneus.
“While fungi mainly live hidden underground and inside wood, their loss impacts the life above-ground that depends on them. As we lose fungi, we impoverish the ecosystem services and resilience they provide, from drought and pathogen resistance in crops and trees to storing carbon in the soil,” said Professor Anders Dahlberg, the IUCN SSC Mushroom, Bracket and Puffball Specialist Group’s Red List authority coordinator, who arranged the latest assessment. “It is important that more old-growth forests are protected. Forestry practices should consider fungi, for example leaving dead wood and scattered trees, and proactive forest management can help manage fire intensity.”
Scaly wood mushrooms (Agaricus augustus) on a tree trunk in London, England on Oct. 22, 2024. Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images
Fungi make up their own kingdom, distinct from plants and animals. They are the second largest kingdom after animals, with approximately 2.5 million species, including roughly 155,000 that have been named.
Fungi support all other ecosystems. Most plants cannot survive without them, partnering up with fungi to absorb nutrients.
Many species of fungi are edible and used in fermentation, food and drink; as the basis for medicines; and to help with cleanup efforts at contaminated sites through bioremediation.
“Fungi are a vital yet often invisible part of biodiversity, supporting ecosystems in ways we are only beginning to understand. The addition of 1,000 fungal species to the IUCN Red List highlights their importance — and the urgent threats they face. With better data, we can take meaningful action to protect fungi, ensuring the health of the plants, animals, and ecosystems that depend on them,” said Dr. Anne Bowser, CEO at nonprofit NatureServe.
Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) have said that Arctic sea ice most likely reached its yearly maximum extent on March 22, at 5.53 million square miles.
The maximum sea ice extent for 2025 is the lowest in a satellite record going back 47 years, falling short of the last record low set in March of 2017.
“This new record low is yet another indicator of how Arctic sea ice has fundamentally changed from earlier decades,” said Walt Meier, NSIDC senior research scientist, in a press release from NSIDC. “But even more importantly than the record low is that this year adds yet another data point to the continuing long-term loss of Arctic sea ice in all seasons.”
Scientists from NSIDC stressed that the measurement of Arctic sea ice extent was preliminary. Weather conditions could alter the total maximum ice extent for the year. NSIDC’s full analysis will be issued in early April.
“In the dark and cold of winter, sea ice forms and spreads across Arctic seas. But in recent years, less new ice has been forming, and less multi-year ice has accumulated. This winter continued a downward trend scientists have observed over the past several decades. This year’s peak ice cover was 510,000 square miles (1.32 million square kilometers) below the average levels between 1981 and 2010,” a press release from NASA said.
Antarctic sea ice hit a near-record-low minimum extent on March 1, at 764,000 square miles, tying the second-lowest yearly minimum on record.
That’s 30 percent lower than the 1.1 million square miles of typical Antarctic sea ice extent prior to 2010. Sea ice extent is the total ocean area with a minimum of 15 percent ice concentration.
“Warming temperatures are what’s causing the ice to decline,” Meier said, as The Associated Press reported. “You know, sea ice in particular is very sensitive… 31 degrees is ice skating and 33 degrees it’s swimming.”
Reduced sea ice extent in both polar regions marked another milestone — the planet’s total sea ice has reached an all-time low. Ice coverage globally in mid-February was more than one million square miles below the average before 2010.
“We’re going to come into this next summer season with less ice to begin with,” said Linette Boisvert, a NASA ice scientist based at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in the NASA press release. “It doesn’t bode well for the future.”
The Arctic is warming at four times the rate of the rest of the planet, and it impacts weather all over the world, reported The Associated Press. As temperature and pressure differences shrink between north and south, the jet stream becomes weaker. This causes it to dip further south, bringing storms and cold temperatures that frequently get stuck, dumping more rain and snow.
“The warming winter atmosphere above the Arctic Circle does impact large-scale weather patterns that do influence those of us outside the Arctic,” said Julienne Stroeve, a University of Manitoba ice scientist.
Ice scientists mostly rely on measurements of Earth’s microwave range radiation by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. The natural radiation is distinct for sea ice and open water, with ice cover appearing bright on satellite images.
“It’s not yet clear whether the Southern Hemisphere has entered a new norm with perennially low ice or if the Antarctic is in a passing phase that will revert to prior levels in the years to come,” Meier said.
In New York City, a ban on natural gas in new buildings has been upheld in federal court, the first case to go against a previous, similar ban in Berkeley, California that was struck down in court.
New York City first adopted a phaseout of fossil fuels in new buildings in 2021, while the state of New York became the first U.S. state to ban natural gas in some new buildings in 2023. The city legislation sets an emissions target, where combustion in a building cannot emit more than 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy, rather than outright banning natural gas installations in new buildings.
By comparison, the law that was struck down in Berkeley specifically banned gas piping in new construction, a law that was struck down in 2023. That decision was again upheld in early 2024, Grist reported.
“It’s a clear win in that regard, because the 9th Circuit decision has had a really chilling effect on local governments,” Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told Mother Jones. “Now there’s something else to point to, and a good reason for hope for local governments that may have back-burnered their building electrification plans to bring those to the forefront again.”
The New York City ban was challenged by industry groups and unions, who argued that the city’s law was preempted by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), a similar argument used in court against the ban in Berkeley.
However, the court disagreed with the challenge, noting that the EPCA preemption clause was not applicable in this case.
District Judge Ronnie Abrams, for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, wrote, “Further, as discussed, the Law affects the type of fuel that covered products may use in certain settings, not the performance standards applicable to covered products, and thus it neither ‘acts immediately and exclusively upon’ EPCA’s regime of uniform national standards, nor makes ‘the existence of’ such standards ‘essential to [its] operation.’”
The judge also noted that regulations on certain fuels and appliances are important parts of city building and fire codes, and if the argument that the gas ban was preempted by EPCA, that could also mean similar preemptions for other safety codes, which would be an “absurd result.”
The court decisions on Berkeley’s gas ban had slowed or prevented other cities from moving forward with similar legislation. Because the decision came from the 9th Circuit court, gas bans are illegal across the entire 9th Circuit region spanning the western U.S.
New York state’s gas ban is facing similar legal challenges, and Mother Jones reported that trade groups behind the challenge to the New York City gas ban plan to appeal the latest court decision.
However, experts said this decision could better encourage other local legislation against fossil fuels in new buildings to move forward.
Turner told Mother Jones, “Even if the air emissions route is not right for a city for whatever reason, other variations of a building electrification requirement or incentive could pass muster.”
Stanford University researchers have discovered that small bursts of electricity — which they call microlightning, created by oppositely charged water droplets interacting in the early Earth, likely created the first organic compounds that later led to life.
For decades, one of the leading hypotheses for the origin of life has been the Miller-Urey hypothesis. In 1952, renowned chemist Harold Urey observed that most planets in the solar system were dominated by nitrogen and methane, and posited that early Earth’s atmosphere likely did as well.
However, as Richard Zare, the study’s senior author and head of Stanford University’s Zare lab where the experiment was conducted, told EcoWatch, life needs carbon-nitrogen bonds to form essential molecules like DNA and RNA, and these bonds would have been completely absent from the early Earth.
Urey, later that same year, along with Stanley Miller, carried out an experiment to test whether Earth could have created these bonds. They used an apparatus with a glass bulb to simulate Earth’s atmosphere, composed of nitrogen, methane and other gases. Then, using a spark plug, they simulated lightning in the atmosphere, and successfully created carbon-nitrogen-bonded organic molecules in the apparatus, thought to be precursors to life.
While the results were groundbreaking, they were not without objections, Zare told EcoWatch. “One of them is that lightning is intermittent and unpredictable,” he said. “And I believe that’s true. And if lightning makes compounds in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is a big thing. They never get concentrated… we need to concentrate these building blocks because we’re making small building blocks.”
But what if Earth didn’t need large lightning strikes at all to create these compounds? That’s the question Zare et al. set out to answer. The study’s lead author, Yifan Meng, carried out the experiment, similar to the Miller-Urey experiment, but on a much smaller scale, still using gases present on early Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago, but using microlightning created by water droplets rather than big sparks.
“We have repeated what Miller and Urey did before, but they did it with big lightning, in a bulb. We’ve done it with water droplets,” Zare said. “And so we propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life.”
The researchers suspended a large droplet of water in air using sound waves. When the sound wave generator was turned off, the levitated water droplet fell and struck a plastic sheet below, causing the water droplet to split into smaller droplets, creating a splash of droplets that interacted with one another, creating sparks of microlightning.
When that microlightning was created in the presence of gases present on early Earth, the electrical discharge interacted with gas and successfully created organic compounds with carbon-nitrogen bonds.
Zare said these interactions are happening constantly in our world, creating microlightning and organic compounds, but are much less consequential than the first time this microlightning created organic molecules billions of years ago.
He added that he wants to continue researching how water droplets interact, and hopes that they can one day be used to clean up our atmosphere.
“I actually am very interested in possibly removing pollutants in our atmosphere with water droplets,” Zare said, “such as can we bubble air through water and remove things like carbon dioxide and methane and turn them into something else? I’m interested in all this. So you ask, what is the future? Many, many futures here.”
Micron-sized water droplets could also provide a sustainable way to create ammonia, which is important for fertilizer and combating global hunger. Zare said that we may be able to scale up the gas-droplet experiment, which creates ammonia as a byproduct, and in doing so, we could replace the Haber-Bosch process of creating ammonia, which is harmful to the environment.
“The Haber-Bosch process takes nitrogen and hydrogen and and combines it to make NH3. That’s ammonia. And where does the hydrogen come from? They get it from natural gas, from methane, by treating it with steam, with hot water vapor under high pressure, high temperature. And the result is the natural gas turns [in part] into CO2,” Zare said.
“And so, believe it or not, 2% or so of the CO2 that you and I now breathe comes from the Haber-Bosch process in the atmosphere. That’s how big this has been. If you could clean up the Haber-Bosch process, you would really make a difference in terms of climate change as we understand it.”
Stanford University researchers have discovered that small bursts of electricity — which they call microlightning, created by oppositely charged water droplets interacting in the early Earth, likely created the first organic compounds that later led to life.
For decades, one of the leading hypotheses for the origin of life has been the Miller-Urey hypothesis. In 1952, renowned chemist Harold Urey observed that most planets in the solar system were dominated by nitrogen and methane, and posited that early Earth’s atmosphere likely did as well.
However, as Richard Zare, the study’s senior author and head of Stanford University’s Zare lab where the experiment was conducted, told EcoWatch, life needs carbon-nitrogen bonds to form essential molecules like DNA and RNA, and these bonds would have been completely absent from the early Earth.
Urey, later that same year, along with Stanley Miller, carried out an experiment to test whether Earth could have created these bonds. They used an apparatus with a glass bulb to simulate Earth’s atmosphere, composed of nitrogen, methane and other gases. Then, using a spark plug, they simulated lightning in the atmosphere, and successfully created carbon-nitrogen-bonded organic molecules in the apparatus, thought to be precursors to life.
While the results were groundbreaking, they were not without objections, Zare told EcoWatch. “One of them is that lightning is intermittent and unpredictable,” he said. “And I believe that’s true. And if lightning makes compounds in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is a big thing. They never get concentrated… we need to concentrate these building blocks because we’re making small building blocks.”
But what if Earth didn’t need large lightning strikes at all to create these compounds? That’s the question Zare et al. set out to answer. The study’s lead author, Yifan Meng, carried out the experiment, similar to the Miller-Urey experiment, but on a much smaller scale, still using gases present on early Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago, but using microlightning created by water droplets rather than big sparks.
“We have repeated what Miller and Urey did before, but they did it with big lightning, in a bulb. We’ve done it with water droplets,” Zare said. “And so we propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life.”
The researchers suspended a large droplet of water in air using sound waves. When the sound wave generator was turned off, the levitated water droplet fell and struck a plastic sheet below, causing the water droplet to split into smaller droplets, creating a splash of droplets that interacted with one another, creating sparks of microlightning.
When that microlightning was created in the presence of gases present on early Earth, the electrical discharge interacted with gas and successfully created organic compounds with carbon-nitrogen bonds.
Zare said these interactions are happening constantly in our world, creating microlightning and organic compounds, but are much less consequential than the first time this microlightning created organic molecules billions of years ago.
He added that he wants to continue researching how water droplets interact, and hopes that they can one day be used to clean up our atmosphere.
“I actually am very interested in possibly removing pollutants in our atmosphere with water droplets,” Zare said, “such as can we bubble air through water and remove things like carbon dioxide and methane and turn them into something else? I’m interested in all this. So you ask, what is the future? Many, many futures here.”
Micron-sized water droplets could also provide a sustainable way to create ammonia, which is important for fertilizer and combating global hunger. Zare said that we may be able to scale up the gas-droplet experiment, which creates ammonia as a byproduct, and in doing so, we could replace the Haber-Bosch process of creating ammonia, which is harmful to the environment.
“The Haber-Bosch process takes nitrogen and hydrogen and and combines it to make NH3. That’s ammonia. And where does the hydrogen come from? They get it from natural gas, from methane, by treating it with steam, with hot water vapor under high pressure, high temperature. And the result is the natural gas turns [in part] into CO2,” Zare said.
“And so, believe it or not, 2% or so of the CO2 that you and I now breathe comes from the Haber-Bosch process in the atmosphere. That’s how big this has been. If you could clean up the Haber-Bosch process, you would really make a difference in terms of climate change as we understand it.”
Coca-Cola products will be responsible for up to 1.33 billion pounds of plastic waste making its way into the planet’s oceans and waterways each year by 2030 — enough to fill the stomachs of more than 18 million blue whales, according to a new report by nonprofit Oceana.
Coca-Cola’s World With Waste projects that the company’s plastic use will be more than 9.1 billion pounds annually by 2030 if its practices do not change. That would be an almost 40 percent increase over Coca-Cola’s reported 2023 plastic use, which was enough to go around the world over 100 times, a press release from Oceana said.
“Coca-Cola’s future is currently tied, like an albatross around its neck, to single-use plastic,” said Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president at Oceana. “Single-use plastic is bad for the oceans, human health, and business. Recycling can’t solve the company’s out-of-control plastic problem. Reuse can.”
The report found that if Coca-Cola reached 26.4 percent reusable packaging — an increase of 16.2 percent from 2023 numbers — it could “bend its plastic curve.”
Reusable plastic bottles can be used as many as 25 times, while reusable glass bottles can be used up to 50 times, avoiding the production of as many as 49 additional single-use bottles.
A study published last year in the journal Science Advances found Coca-Cola to be the biggest producer of branded plastic waste found in the environment.
“Unfortunately, the Coca-Cola Company communicated in December 2024 that it had discarded its goal to increase reusable packaging to 25% of the company’s sales,” Oceana said.
The company announced that, instead of its previous goal, it will focus on ramping up its recycled content, as well as on collecting its single-use plastic bottles to be recycled.
However, as the Oceana report details, selling single-use plastic packaging with recycled content and the collection of plastic for recycling will not lower Coca-Cola’s overall plastic footprint.
“Single-use plastic bottles made with recycled content can — just like bottles made of virgin plastic — still become marine pollution and harm ocean life,” Littlejohn said.
Coca-Cola currently operates refillable systems in some countries, including Nigeria, Brazil, Germany and some areas of the United States, like southern Texas, reported The Guardian.
“They have the largest reusable infrastructure of any beverage company and they have the ability to grow that and show the way for the rest of the industry,” Littlejohn said, as The Guardian reported.
The multi-billion-dollar company could face more criticism due to mounting public concern regarding plastic’s impact on human health, the press release said. Studies have increasingly connected the chemicals used in the manufacturing of plastics with health problems such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autism and infertility.
If Coca-Cola won’t address its global plastic problem, Oceana recommended policymakers consider taking steps to make sure the company’s plastic footprint is reduced.
“The Coca-Cola Company’s plastic use and status as one of the most famous plastic polluters in the world is a liability for the future of the company, the oceans, and the planet. Coca-Cola needs to take real action to address its plastic problem now instead of focusing on measures that don’t meaningfully reduce its single-use plastic footprint,” Littlejohn added.
One of the largest studies ever conducted on biodiversity loss worldwide has revealed that humans are having a severely detrimental impact on global wildlife.
The number of species is declining, as well as the composition of populations.
“Biological diversity is under threat. More and more plant and animal species are disappearing worldwide, and humans are responsible. Until now, however, there has been no synthesis of the extent of human intervention in nature and whether the effects can be found everywhere in the world and in all groups of organisms,” a press release from University of Zurich (UZH) said. “This is because most of the studies conducted to date have only looked at individual aspects. They either examined changes in species diversity over time or were limited to a single location or to specific human impacts.”
To fill in the gaps, a team of scientists from UZH and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) collected data from roughly 2,100 studies comparing biodiversity at nearly 50,000 sites that had been impacted by humans with an equal number of reference locations that remained unaffected.
“It is one of the largest syntheses of the human impacts on biodiversity ever conducted worldwide,” said Florian Altermatt, a UZH professor of aquatic ecology and head of an Eawag research group, in the press release.
The findings, “The global human impact on biodiversity,” were published in the journal Nature and leave no doubt as to the devastation humans are imposing on global biodiversity.
“We analyzed the effects of the five main human impacts on biodiversity: habitat changes, direct exploitation such as hunting or fishing, climate change, pollution and invasive species,” said lead author François Keck, a postdoctoral researcher at Eawag, in the press release. “Our findings show that all five factors have a strong impact on biodiversity worldwide, in all groups of organisms and in all ecosystems.”
Pollution is one of the five most important drivers of biodiversity loss globally – especially when untreated wastewater pollutes natural waters. Florian Altermatt
The average number of species at affected sites was nearly one-fifth lower than at those that were unaffected. Vertebrates such as amphibians, reptiles and mammals were found that have experienced especially dramatic species loss across all biogeographic regions. These populations have a tendency to be significantly smaller than those of invertebrates, which makes them more vulnerable to extinction.
“Biodiversity change poses a critical threat to human societies from local to global scales, highlighting the urgent need for understanding the complex relationship between human pressures and their effects on ecosystems,” the authors wrote in the findings. “Human pressures, broadly classified in five main types — land-use change, resource exploitation, pollution, climate change and invasive species — can enhance or reduce species diversity locally. Crucially, by impacting biodiversity at local scales, effects of human pressures can similarly impact biodiversity patterns among communities at broader spatial scales.”
In addition to population numbers, species composition is another key aspect of biodiversity. Keck said human pressure is causing a decline in species numbers, as well as a shift in the composition of their communities.
“In high mountain regions, for example, specialized plants are at risk of being displaced by species from lower altitudes as the climate warms. In some circumstances, the number of species at a particular site may remain the same; nevertheless, biodiversity and its ecosystem functions will be affected if, for example, a plant species disappears that has particularly good root systems to protect the soil from erosion,” the press release said.
The largest shifts in the composition of species communities are among microbes and fungi.
“This could be because these organisms have short life cycles and high dispersion rates and therefore respond more quickly,” Keck explained.
The study found that habitat changes and environmental pollution had an exceptionally negative impact on species numbers and composition.
Altermatt said that wasn’t surprising, as habitat changes can often be drastic, as when humans raze a meadow or cut down a forest. Pollution, whether it is accidental, as with an oil spill, or deliberate, as in the spraying of pesticides, introduces destructive substances into habitats that weaken or destroy their organisms.
A third aspect of biodiversity investigated by the team was homogeneity — the similarity of species communities at different sites.
“For example, large-scale, intensive agriculture tends to make landscapes more homogeneous, and the species communities they contain more similar. The effects were mixed, with some studies showing a very strong tendency towards homogenization, and others showing a tendency for species communities to become more diverse, especially at the local level,” the press release said.
The researchers expressed doubt in the latter being a positive sign. They speculated that an uptick in dissimilarities could be a temporary result in severely impacted habitats.
“The human influence that we find is sometimes so strong that there are even signs that could indicate a complete collapse of the species communities,” Altermatt said.
The authors said the findings can serve as benchmarks for conservation efforts and biodiversity research going forward.
“Our findings provide clear indications of which human influences are having the greatest impact on biodiversity,” Keck said. “This also shows what goals need to be set if these trends are to be reversed.”
According to a new study currently undergoing peer review, chewing gum could be a source of ingested microplastics. Researchers found that chewing gum could release thousands of microplastic particles into saliva over time, increasing the chance of ingestion.
“Our goal is not to alarm anybody,” Sanjay Mohanty, principal investigator of the study and an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a statement. “Scientists don’t know if microplastics are unsafe to us or not. There are no human trials. But we know we are exposed to plastics in everyday life, and that’s what we wanted to examine here.”
Scientists analyzed five brands of natural and five brands of synthetic chewing gums to determine potential for microplastic shedding. While synthetic chewing gums are made with rubbery, petroleum-based polymers, natural gum varieties rely on plant-based polymers for that chewable texture, with the polymers often coming from tree sap.
“Our initial hypothesis was that the synthetic gums would have a lot more microplastics because the base is a type of plastic,” said Lisa Lowe, a graduate student at UCLA who is presenting the research this week at the American Chemical Society spring meeting.
In one experiment in the study, each gum sample was chewed for 4 minutes, with saliva samples pulled every 30 seconds. After chewing, the person rinsed their mouth with water and that too became a sample. For another experiment, researchers collected saliva samples multiple times throughout a 20-minute timeframe and measured the microplastic amounts in each sample.
While researchers had expected to find more microplastic shedding from synthetic gums, both natural and synthetic products led to similar amounts of microplastics released into saliva, often within just 2 minutes of chewing the gum. Both natural and synthetic gums had the same polymers, most of which were polyolefins. As the American Chemical Society reported, this group of plastics contains plastic types such as polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
The team found an average of 100 microplastics shed into saliva for each gram of gum. Some pieces of gum released up to 637 microplastics per gram.
Based on the calculations of a gram of gum weighing between 2 and 6 grams, the researchers determined that a single stick of gum could release up to 3,000 microplastics, and for habitual gum-chewers, this could add up to 10,000 microplastics shed into saliva per year.
As Reuters reported, humans ingest around 5 grams of microplastics per week, and the new research revealed that chewing gum could contribute to the amount of ingested plastic particles.
To minimize ingestion, the researchers recommended chewing one piece of gum for longer versus swapping in new sticks of gum more frequently, based on their findings that 94% of the collected microplastics were released within 8 minutes of chewing.
But the findings also revealed that people should avoid discarding gum into environments, where additional microplastics could be shed and the polymer-based gum itself could become a piece of pollution.
“The plastic released into saliva is a small fraction of the plastic that’s in the gum,” Mohanty said in a statement. “So, be mindful about the environment and don’t just throw it outside or stick it to a gum wall.”
As our planet has experienced increased warming over the last several decades due to greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, glaciers around the world have been shrinking.
An international team of scientists has found that global heating has, over the past two decades, melted enough of Greenland’s glacial ice that 1,006.6 more miles of coastline have become exposed.
“Accelerated climate warming has caused the majority of marine-terminating glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere to retreat substantially during the twenty-first century,” the authors of the findings wrote in a paper published in Nature Climate Change.
The researchers described how they tracked the receding glaciers by comparing Northern Hemisphere satellite imagery from 2000 to 2020. They used the images to track the exposure of Greenland’s coastline as ice flows heading toward the sea became smaller, reported Phys.org.
“We identified a total of 2,466 ± 0.8 km (123 km a−1) of new coastline with most (66%) of the total length occurring in Greenland,” the scientists wrote in the findings.
The research team was also able to measure individual glaciers along Greenland’s exposed coast. One example was the melting of Zachariae Isstrom, which led to approximately 50 miles of coastline being exposed — two times the amount of any other Northern Hemisphere glacier.
The melting glaciers revealed 35 islands that had been obscured by ice until recently, 29 of which are part of Greenland.
“As marine-terminating glaciers retreat they reveal new coasts that often consist of unconsolidated glacial landforms, such as moraines, eskers, crevasse squeeze ridges or glaciofluvial deposits and deltas, as well as glacially polished bedrock. In some cases, the newly exposed coastline is in the form of rocky islands,” the scientists wrote. “The paraglacial coast exposed from beneath glacial ice differs from much of the Arctic coast as it is not initially affected by permafrost, which needs 2 years or more to aggrade after deglaciation. This lack of permafrost and associated ice cementation means that sediment can be easily eroded, transported and deposited, creating an Arctic system that is geomorphologically uniquely dynamic.”
Spatial distribution and examples of new and lost coastlines in the Arctic from 2000 to 2020. Nature Climate Change (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02282-5
The scientists noted that 13 of the newly exposed islands have not yet been recorded on a map, meaning they have not been claimed by any nation. The discovery could lead to “jockeying” by countries set on accessing potential natural resources the islands could contain.
The retreat of the glaciers poses a risk to local communities in the coastal zone. Regions surrounding marine-terminating glaciers are more susceptible to tsunamis triggered by landslides, the researchers said.
“These young paraglacial coastlines are highly dynamic, exhibiting high sediment fluxes and rapidly evolving landforms. Retreating glaciers and associated newly exposed coastline can have important impacts on local ecosystems and Arctic communities,” the scientists wrote. “Calving fronts of tidewater glaciers, where small tsunamis frequently form are often visited by tourists for their beauty and abundant wildlife.”
