The cactus on your desk is an evolution speed machine

University of Reading

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The cactus on your windowsill may grow slowly, but new research shows that cacti are surprisingly fast at creating new species. 

Biologists have long thought that pollinators and specialised flowers drive the formation of new plant species. But scientists at the University of Reading found that in cacti, the secret lies in how quickly flowers change shape, rather than how big the flowers grow or which animal pollinates them. 

Researchers studied flower length data for more than 750 cactus species, covering a 185-fold range in size from just 2mm to 37cm. Despite this variation, flower length had almost no relationship with how fast a species split into new ones. Instead, species whose flowers were evolving most rapidly were also the most likely to branch into new species, an effect that held across both recent and deep evolutionary history. 

Their study, published today (Wednesday, 18 March) in Biology Letters, challenges ideas going back to Charles Darwin, who studied orchids and suggested that specialised flower forms drove the creation of new plant species. 

Jamie Thompson, lead author at the University of Reading, said: "People may think of cacti as tough, slow-growing plants, but our research shows that the cactus family is one of the fastest-evolving plant groups on Earth. Knowing how fast cacti evolve reveals that deserts, often seen as harsh and unchanging, are actually hotbeds of rapid natural change. 

"We expected cacti with longer, more specialised flowers to be the ones creating the most new species. Instead, flower size made almost no difference. What matters is how quickly flowers change shape. Cacti whose flowers evolve rapidly are far more likely to split into new species than those whose flowers stay the same, however elaborate they are. 

“This result has real implications for conservation. Since flower evolution has helped generate cactus species over millions of years, evolutionary pace should become part of conservation efforts. Although being able to rapidly evolve does not guarantee resilience, especially as the planet is changing faster than most cacti can keep up, it could help predict which species need the most help. Rather than searching for a single trait that predicts which cacti are most at risk, conservationists may need to look at how fast a species is evolving instead." 

Mapping the cactus family tree 

The cactus family contains around 1,850 species and is one of the fastest-expanding plant groups on Earth, spreading across the Americas over the past 20 to 35 million years.  

This research was made possible by a new Open Access database called CactEcoDB, created by lead author Jamie Thompson and developed in collaboration with ten coauthors from three continents, including six from the University of Reading. Published this month in Nature Scientific Data, it brings together seven years of work compiling cactus traits, habitats, and evolutionary relationships. With nearly a third of cacti threatened with extinction, the database provides a shared resource for scientists worldwide, to study their biodiversity, conservation and future under climate change, for the first time. 

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Journal

Biology Letters

DOI

10.1098/rsbl.2025.0834 

Article Title

Faster speciating cacti have faster evolving flowers

Article Publication Date

18-Mar-2026

 

Investors willing to pay a little more for green bonds

Premium for green debt could help fund sustainable projects

University of Texas at Austin

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Green investors often boast that they can support sustainability without sacrificing returns. But new research from Texas McCombs suggests otherwise. It also offers governments opportunities to raise more money from those investors for sustainable projects.

In Germany’s sovereign bond market, buyers are quietly paying a premium for green bonds — by accepting lower yields on them. So finds Aaron Pancost, assistant professor of finance, who calls the difference a “greenium.”

Pancost’s central question was the size of the greenium. “How much are investors willing to pay for investments that are green?” he says.

With Stefania D’Amico of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Johannes Klausmann from the University of Houston, Pancost looked at German government bonds from 2009 to 2023.

Germany makes a good test case, he explains, because each green bond has a near‑identical twin: an ordinary bond with the same issuer, maturity, and coupon. Any price difference between the bonds can be related to how much extra people are willing to spend — just because of a “green” label.

Data on the bonds are also very transparent, he says. “There’s a whole process for auditing them beforehand and afterward to show what they did invest in and how those investments turned out.”

Measuring Green Interest

But measuring the greenium was not as simple as comparing the interest rate on a green bond with a twinned regular bond, the researchers found.

The spread doesn’t only reflect environmental preferences. It can widen and narrow for other reasons. For example, investors sometimes rush into regular German bonds as safe havens or to use as collateral for loans.

So, the researchers also developed a second measure. They estimated pricing patterns for all German government bonds: one for regular bonds and one for green bonds. The difference between those two patterns gave a cleaner measure of the greenium:

• Over time, it averaged 4 basis points or 4% of the yield on a 10-year bond.
• It wasn’t static but increased after major climate events — such as severe flooding in Germany — and during periods of energy stress. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it peaked at 7 basis points.
• By 2023, the greenium was larger for short-term bonds than for long-term bonds, suggesting investors expected it to decline over time.

Pancost was surprised at the narrowness of the gap between regular and green bonds. “Those two securities have prices that are very close to each other, but one is slightly higher,” he says. “It’s quite modest in the grand scheme of things.”

In practical terms, by accepting slightly lower yields on green bonds, investors are helping to finance the green transition, he adds.

That knowledge could allow governments to issue more short-term green bonds with lower interest rates, saving money for taxpayers. “It’s free money, so long as the government is making those green investments anyway,” he says.

Although Germany, France, the UK, and many other countries issue green bonds, the U.S. does not. Pancost sees this as a missed opportunity.

“Investors are giving up profit in order to invest in something green,” he says. “If people want to invest in green, we should let them.”

“The Benchmark Greenium” is published in Journal of Financial Economics.

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Journal

Journal of Financial Economics

DOI

10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104217 

Article Title

The benchmark greenium

 

Scientists turn rubber waste into New Materials and capture CO2

Researchers have unveiled two breakthrough techniques for chemically recycling and upcycling nitrile‑rubber products, such as disposable gloves, seals, and industrial parts, into new materials that also capture CO2

University of St. Andrews

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image: 

Nitrile Gloves upcycling

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Credit: Amit Kumar/University of St Andrews

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have unveiled two breakthrough techniques for chemically recycling and upcycling nitrile‑rubber products, such as disposable gloves, seals, and industrial parts, into new materials that are also capable of capturing carbon dioxide. 

The development of sustainable methods for the upcycling of plastic waste is one of the most important challenges in achieving a circular economy and can play a significant role in tackling the climate crisis.  

Among various plastics that need to be recycled, nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) has received comparatively little attention, despite a large market of 36 million tons or $2.5 billion globally per year. NBR has wide applications ranging from disposable gloves to hoses, seals, and circular seals used to prevent leaks. 

NBR is challenging to recycle due to its thermoset nature, with less than 2% currently recycled, often through low-value downcycling.  

However, in a paper published today (19th March) in Angewandte Chemie, researchers from the School of Chemistry at St Andrews, introduce two new ways to chemically recycle NBR and turn it into useful new materials.  

By using a ruthenium catalyst and hydrogen gas, researchers were able to “unlock” the chemical bonds in NBR and convert it into either polyamines or polyols, depending on the reaction conditions. Remarkably, the process to make polyamines works at temperatures as low as 35 °C, while making polyols requires higher temperatures but achieves excellent efficiency. 

Additionally, the resulting polyamines were shown to capture CO₂, with their amine groups binding carbon dioxide to form stable compounds, a process widely employed in industrial carbon-capture technologies. This opens the possibility of using recycled materials to remove CO₂ from emissions or the atmosphere, combining plastic recycling with climate action. 

Sustainable chemical recycling or upcycling routes to convert NBR into valuable chemicals or materials would be a huge leap towards greater sustainability 

Lead author Dr Amit Kumar from the School of Chemistry said: “We are thrilled by this discovery, which lets us turn nitrile glove waste from chemistry labs into valuable new materials. With further development, this technology could tackle two of the planet’s biggest waste problems at once: plastic pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.”     

ENDS 

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Journal

Angewandte Chemie

DOI

10.1002/anie.202525705 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Chemical Upcycling of Nitrile Butadiene Rubbers to Polyamines and Polyols by Chemoselective Catalytic Hydrogenation

Article Publication Date

18-Mar-2026

 

Rapid melting of Antarctic sea ice largely driven by ocean warming

University of Gothenburg

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image: 

Southern Elephant seal with a CTD-SRDL tag.

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Credit: Photo: Dan Costa (UCSC)

Sea ice around Antarctica expanded for several decades until a dramatic decline in 2015. The reasons behind this are revealed by research from the University of Gothenburg.

Antarctic sea ice plays a crucial role in the ecosystem and physical environment of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Since the ice reflects the sun's rays and blocks heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere, it is critical to our weather and climate. Therefore, we need to understand what affects its extent to improve future climate models and prediction.

While Arctic sea ice has been steadily declining since satellite measurements of sea ice began, Antarctic sea ice has exhibited a completely different behaviour. After expanding slowly for several decades, Antarctic sea ice declined rapidly in late 2015 and has since experienced large year-to-year fluctuations in extent. Research on this change, led by the University of Gothenburg, is now published in Nature Climate Change.

Protective layer

“There was a protective layer of cold water beneath the sea ice in Antarctica that prevented warmer deep water from rising and melting the ice from below. But during the winter of 2015, storms in the Southern Ocean were unusually strong, reducing the cold-water protective layer effect and resulting in the sustained sea ice loss around Antarctica,” says Theo Spira, former doctoral student in oceanography at the University of Gothenburg and first author to the study.

Water masses with large differences in salinity and/or temperature do not mix easily and settle in layers on top of each other. This is called stratification. The cold Winter Water layer that protects the sea ice becomes increasingly fresh as the ice grows from more sea ice melt, and this increases stratification in relation to the warm and salty water layer below.

Storms stirred things up

This natural protection contributed to long-term growth in Antarctic Sea ice until 2015. However, under the ice the Winter Water layer slowly got thinner as the deep water got warmer, weakening the ocean’s protective cool layer.

“With the help of almost two decades of observations, I can see that the Winter Water layer has thinned over large parts of the Southern Ocean, allowing the deep, warm water to approach the surface. The storms in 2015 stirred up the sea and warmer water mixed with the cold-water layer, the protection disappeared and the ice melted at record speed,” says Theo Spira.

Elephant seals help scientists

The Southern Ocean is a remote environment for research, far from inhabited areas. Theo Spira used autonomous marine robots to measure temperature and salinity in the ocean water but also enlisted the help of elephant seals living in the area. Sensors were attached to their bodies, which accompanied them on their long dives hundreds of metres down into the ocean. After 10 months, the sensor detaches from the elephant seal.

“This is valuable because elephant seals live within and at the edge of the sea ice in Antarctica and can provide data on the stratification of the water there. Winter Water acts as a gatekeeper for heat exchange between the deep ocean and the surface, and by quantifying its role, my research identifies processes that are missing or poorly represented in today's climate models,” says Theo Spira.

The Antarctic sea ice is getting thinner in recent years.

Credit

Theo Spira

Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-026-02601-4 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Wind-triggered Antarctic sea ice decline preconditioned by thinning Winter Water

Article Publication Date

18-Mar-2026