It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
Farmers’ voices in European protests
Research team examines farmers’ protest motivations and political responses in four EU countries
Farmers’ protests that swept across Europe in 2024 were driven by a wide range of concerns that differ markedly between countries, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Göttingen. Based on survey responses from more than 2,200 farmers in Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the study finds that farmers’ motivations go far beyond commonly cited issues such as environmental regulations. Instead, complaints range from bureaucracy and low incomes to political dissatisfaction and uncertainty about the future of farming. The findings also suggest that policy responses at national and EU level only partly reflect farmers’ actual priorities. The results were published in the journal Food Policy.
To better understand what motivates farmers to protest, the research team analysed open-ended survey answers collected shortly after the protests. Farmers were asked to describe their reasons for discontent in their own words, without predefined response options. The researchers combined manual analysis with AI–based text analysis to identify recurring themes and assess the emotional tone of the responses. “This approach allows us to capture what farmers themselves consider most important, rather than what policymakers or interest groups assume,” explains first author Professor Doris Läpple. The analysis shows clear national differences: farmers in Germany mainly criticised bureaucracy, French farmers focused on financial pressures, Belgian farmers expressed a broad mix of concerns, while Dutch farmers most frequently voiced dissatisfaction with policy.
The study also examined how strongly emotions such as anger or frustration shaped farmers’ statements. Specific complaints, for example about excessive bureaucracy or income problems, were often expressed in a frustrated tone. More general dissatisfaction with politics, by contrast, was sometimes voiced more aggressively. Alongside this analysis of how farmers articulated their concerns, the study also looked at how policymakers responded to the protests. While some key concerns, including administrative burden and financial strain, were addressed by policymakers, environmental issues received disproportionately high attention relative to how often farmers mentioned them. “Our results highlight the risk of oversimplifying farmers’ protests,” says Läpple. “A better alignment between farmers’ real concerns and policy responses could help ease tensions and make agricultural policy more effective in the long run.”
Original publication: Läpple, D., et al. “Farmers’ Voices in European Protests: Diverse Complaints, Emotional Tones, and Policy Responses”. Food Policy (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102999
Farmers’ Voices in European Protests: Diverse Complaints, Emotional Tones, and Policy Responses
Golden Gate method enables rapid, fully-synthetic engineering of therapeutically relevant bacteriophages
Simplified bacteriophage design and synthesis to propel long-obstructed bacteriophage research in new PNAS study from New England Biolabs® and Yale University
Bacteriophages have been used therapeutically to treat infectious bacterial diseases for over a century. As antibiotic-resistant infections increasingly threaten public health, interest in bacteriophages as therapeutics has seen a resurgence. However, the field remains largely limited to naturally occurring strains, as laborious strain engineering techniques have limited the pace of discovery and the creation of tailored therapeutic strains.
Now, researchers from New England Biolabs (NEB®) and Yale University describe the first fully synthetic bacteriophage engineering system for Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium of global concern, in a new PNAS study. The system is enabled by NEB’s High-Complexity Golden Gate Assembly (HC-GGA) platform. In this method, researchers engineer bacteriophages synthetically using sequence data rather than bacteriophage isolates. The team assembled a P. aeruginosa phage from 28 synthetic fragments, and programmed it with new behaviors through point mutations, DNA insertions and deletions. These modifications included swapping tail fiber genes to alter the bacterial host range and inserting fluorescent reporters to visualize infection in real time.
“Even in the best of cases, bacteriophage engineering has been extremely labor-intensive. Researchers spent entire careers developing processes to engineer specific model bacteriophages in host bacteria,” reflects Andy Sikkema, the paper’s co-first author and Research Scientist at NEB. “This synthetic method offers technological leaps in simplicity, safety and speed, paving the way for biological discoveries and therapeutic development.”
A new approach to bacteriophage engineering
With NEB’s Golden Gate Assembly platform, scientists can build an entire phage genome based on digital sequence data outside the cell, piece by piece, with any intended edits already included. The genome is assembled directly from synthetic DNA and introduced into a safe laboratory strain.
The method removes long-standing challenges of relying on the propagation of physical phage isolates and specialized strains of host bacteria, a heightened challenge for therapeutically-relevant phages, which specifically infect human pathogens. In addition, the process removes the need for labor‑intensive screening or iterative editing required by in-cell engineering methods.
Unlike DNA assembly methods that join fewer and longer DNA fragments, Golden Gate Assembly’s segments are shorter, making them less toxic to host cells, easier to prepare, and much less likely to contain errors. The method is also less sensitive to the repeats and extreme GC content found in many phage genomes.
Through simplification and increased versatility, the Golden Gate method of bacteriophage engineering dramatically shifts the window of possibilities for researchers dedicated to developing bacteriophages as therapeutic agents to overcome antibiotic resistance.
Molecular tools finding their purpose
Realizing the rapid method of synthetic bacteriophage engineering required an intersection of expertise between NEB’s scientists, who developed the basic tools to make Golden Gate reliable for large targets and many DNA fragments, and bacteriophage researchers at Yale University who recognized its potential, and reached out to collaborate on new, ambitious applications.
Researchers at NEB first worked to optimize the method in a model phage, Escherichia coli phage T7. Since then, partnering teams have worked with NEB scientists to expand the method to non-model bacteriophages that target highly antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
A related study, which used the Golden Gate method to synthesize high-GC content Mycobacterium phages, was published in PNAS in November 2025 in conjunction with the Hatfull Lab at the University of Pittsburgh and Ansa Biotechnologies. Researchers from Cornell University have also worked with NEB to develop a method to synthetically engineer T7 bacteriophages as biosensors capable of detecting E. coli in drinking water, described in a December 2025 ACS study.
“My lab builds 'weird hammers' and then looks for the right nails,” said Greg Lohman, Senior Principal Investigator at NEB and co-author on the study. “In this case, the phage therapy community told us, 'That’s exactly the hammer we’ve been waiting for.’”
About New England Biolabs
For over 50 years, New England Biolabs (NEB) has pioneered the discovery and production of innovative products tailored for molecular biology research. Our commitment to scientific discovery is evident in all that we do, including our ever-expanding product portfolio, investment in our basic and applied research program, and support of customers’ research in academia and industry, including cutting-edge technologies for use in molecular diagnostics and nucleic-acid vaccines development. Guided by our founding principles, NEB proactively invests in efforts to improve the well-being of our employees, surrounding communities, as well as the future of our planet. NEB remains a privately held company with global reach, supported by our headquarters in Ipswich, MA, USA, subsidiary offices in 10 countries, and over 60 distribution partners around the world. For more information about New England Biolabs, visit www.neb.com.
NEB® and NEW ENGLAND BIOLABS® are registered trademarks of New England Biolabs, Inc.
Over the years, passing spacecraft have observed mystifying weather patterns at the poles of Jupiter and Saturn. The two planets host very different types of polar vortices, which are huge atmospheric whirlpools that rotate over a planet’s polar region. On Saturn, a single massive polar vortex appears to cap the north pole in a curiously hexagonal shape, while on Jupiter, a central polar vortex is surrounded by eight smaller vortices, like a pan of swirling cinnamon rolls.
Given that both planets are similar in many ways — they are roughly the same size and made from the same gaseous elements — the stark difference in their polar weather patterns has been a longstanding mystery.
Now, MIT scientists have identified a possible explanation for how the two different systems may have evolved. Their findings could help scientists understand not only the planets’ surface weather patterns, but also what might lie beneath the clouds, deep within their interiors.
In a study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team simulates various ways in which well-organized vortex patterns may form out of random stimulations on a gas giant. A gas giant is a large planet that is made mostly of gaseous elements, such as Jupiter and Saturn. Among a wide range of plausible planetary configurations, the team found that, in some cases, the currents coalesced into a single large vortex, similar to Saturn’s pattern, whereas other simulations produced multiple large circulations, akin to Jupiter’s vortices.
After comparing simulations, the team found that vortex patterns, and whether a planet develops one or multiple polar vortices, comes down to one main property: the “softness” of a vortex’s base, which is related to the interior composition. The scientists liken an individual vortex to a whirling cylinder spinning through a planet’s many atmospheric layers. When the base of this swirling cylinder is made of softer, lighter materials, any vortex that evolves can only grow so large. The final pattern can then allow for multiple smaller vortices, similar to those on Jupiter. In contrast, if a vortex’s base is made of harder, denser stuff, it can grow much larger and subsequently engulf other vortices to form one single, massive vortex, akin to the monster cyclone on Saturn.
“Our study shows that, depending on the interior properties and the softness of the bottom of the vortex, this will influence the kind of fluid pattern you observe at the surface,” says study author Wanying Kang, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “I don’t think anyone’s made this connection between the surface fluid pattern and the interior properties of these planets. One possible scenario could be that Saturn has a harder bottom than Jupiter.”
The study’s first author is MIT graduate student Jiaru Shi.
Spinning up
Kang and Shi’s new work was inspired by images of Jupiter and Saturn that have been taken by the Juno and Cassini missions. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been orbiting around Jupiter since 2016, and has captured stunning images of the planet’s north pole and its multiple swirling vortices. From these images, scientists have estimated that each of Jupiter’s vortices is immense, spanning about 3,000 miles across — almost half as wide as the Earth itself.
The Cassini spacecraft, prior to intentionally burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, orbited the ringed planet for 13 years. Its observations of Saturn’s north pole recorded a single, hexagonal-shaped polar vortex, about 18,000 miles wide.
“People have spent a lot of time deciphering the differences between Jupiter and Saturn,” Shi says. “The planets are about the same size and are both made mostly of hydrogen and helium. It’s unclear why their polar vortices are so different.”
Shi and Kang set out to identify a physical mechanism that would explain why one planet might evolve a single vortex, while the other hosts multiple vortices. To do so, they worked with a two-dimensional model of surface fluid dynamics. While a polar vortex is three-dimensional in nature, the team reasoned that they could accurately represent vortex evolution in two dimensions, as the fast rotation of Jupiter and Saturn enforces uniform motion along the rotating axis.
“In a fast-rotating system, fluid motion tends to be uniform along the rotating axis,” Kang explains. “So, we were motivated by this idea that we can reduce a 3D dynamical problem to a 2D problem because the fluid pattern does not change in 3D. This makes the problem hundreds of times faster and cheaper to simulate and study.”
Getting to the bottom
Following this reasoning, the team developed a two-dimensional model of vortex evolution on a gas giant, based on an existing equation that describes how swirling fluid evolves over time.
“This equation has been used in many contexts, including to model midlatitude cyclones on Earth,” Kang says. “We adapted the equation to the polar regions of Jupiter and Saturn.”
The team applied their two-dimensional model to simulate how fluid would evolve over time on a gas giant under different scenarios. In each scenario, the team varied the planet’s size, its rate of rotation, its internal heating, and the softness or hardness of the rotating fluid, among other parameters. They then set a random “noise” condition, in which fluid initially flowed in random patterns across the planet’s surface. Finally, they observed how the fluid evolved over time given the scenario’s specific conditions.
Over multiple different simulations, they observed that some scenarios evolved to form a single large polar vortex, like Saturn, whereas others formed multiple smaller vortices, like Jupiter. After analyzing the combinations of parameters and variables in each scenario and how they related to the final outcome, they landed on a single mechanism to explain whether a single or multiple vortices evolve: As random fluid motions start to coalesce into individual vortices, the size to which a vortex can grow is limited by how soft the bottom of the vortex is. The softer, or lighter the gas is that is rotating at the bottom of a vortex, the smaller the vortex is in the end, allowing for multiple smaller-scale vortices to coexist at a planet’s pole, similar to those on Jupiter.
Conversely, the harder or denser a vortex bottom is, the larger the system can grow, to a size where eventually it can follow the planet’s curvature as a single, planetary-scale vortex, like the one on Saturn.
If this mechanism is indeed what is at play on both gas giants, it would suggest that Jupiter could be made of softer, lighter material, while Saturn may harbor heavier stuff in its interior.
“What we see from the surface, the fluid pattern on Jupiter and Saturn, may tell us something about the interior, like how soft the bottom is,” Shi says. “And that is important because maybe beneath Saturn’s surface, the interior is more metal-enriched and has more condensable material which allows it to provide stronger stratification than Jupiter. This would add to our understanding of these gas giants.”
This research was supported, in part, by a Mathworks Fellowship and endowed funding from MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
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Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Article Title
“Polar vortex dynamics on gas giants: Insights from 2D energy cascades”
Socio-environmental movements: key global guardians of biodiversity amid rising violence
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals that organized civil society and social mobilizations are key, yet often unrecognized, agents of global biodiversity conservation. By analyzing a global dataset of 2,801 socio-environmental mobilizations from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), the research identifies that local struggles against polluting industries are critical for protecting the planet’s biodiversity most sensitive regions.
The research highlights a striking overlap between social activism and global conservation priorities: about 40% of all documented mobilizations occur within the top 30% of global priority lands for species conservation. These movements— that comprise Indigenous Peoples, peasant organizations, urban groups, grassroots and socio-environmental organizations—proactively and reactively challenge environmental threats from economic sectors such as mining, fossil fuels, industrial agriculture or waste management among other economic sectors.
The study “Socio-environmental mobilizations are agents of transformative change for biodiversity” examined 2,801 socio-environmental conflicts from 1992 to 2022 across 152 countries. The study, which originated as part of the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, has been coordinated by Mariana Walter (IBEI), Victoria Reyes-García (ICREA Professor at ICTA-UAB) and Arnim Scheidel (ICTA-UAB) and conducted by an international team of researchers drawing on data from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas).
Bridging Local Action and Global Targets
The analysis finds that socio-environmental mobilizations are instrumental in achieving international biodiversity protection and conservation goals. The actions taken by these movements contribute significantly to 13 of the 23 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), specifically those focused on ecosystem protection, restoration, and sustainable land management.
Civil society and social struggle has historically been a decisive catalyst for social change, yet its role in biodiversity has remained underexplored. “Our findings highlight that by resisting environmental degradation to defend their livelihoods and environments, these communities act as a key force for sustainability transformations”, according to Arnim Scheidel, Senior Researcher at Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB).
The High Price of Protection
The study also uncovers a grim reality: socio-environmental mobilizations that are playing a key role protecting biodiversity tend to face higher levels of violence and criminalization. “One-third of all documented mobilizations face repression, criminalization, or violence. Alarmingly, these repressive outcomes are even more frequent in high-priority conservation areas and the Global South, particularly in Africa and the Americas” highlighted Mariana Walter, Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI).
A Call for Global Policy Shifts
To support movements and amplify the transformative potential of environmental defenders, the study identifies three critical policy leverage points. First, states and international bodies must recognize socio-environmental mobilizations as legitimate allies for conservation rather than as obstructive actors. Second, there is an urgent need to strengthen these movements by broadening their access to resources and networks of support. Finally, environmental defenders must be further protected through enhanced security protocols and the enforcement of human rights. As stated by Victoria Reyes-García, ICREA Researcher at ICTA-UAB: “Recognising, supporting and protecting socio-environmental movements can empower their capacity to catalyze lasting change for the benefit of both people and the planet.”
