Alistair Boxall, 58, is a chemist and professor of environmental science at the University of York. In 2022, he helped lead the largest study ever conducted on pharmaceutical pollution in rivers around the world. Boxall is now leading a new monitoring project covering 93 rivers in 31 European countries. Among them are the Manzanares, Jarama, Henares and Pantueña streams in the Madrid region, as well as the Zadorra and Nervión rivers in Álava.

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The so-called “delayed prescribing” is an evidence-based strategy that remains underused despite concerns over the misuse of antibiotics and the rise of superbugs, which are responsible for an estimated 1.2 million deaths worldwide each year. Under this approach, a doctor prescribes treatment for a patient with a respiratory infection but advises them to monitor their symptoms and wait up to 72 hours before collecting the medication from the pharmacy and starting the course.

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For seven months babies have been dying in the same neonatal ward in Guadalajara, in the Mexican state of Jalisco. An outbreak of two bacteria in that intensive care area has deprived at least 18 mothers of their newborns. Some of those women have never met; others recognize each other because the other’s child slept in the incubator next to theirs. Together they have formed a WhatsApp group where they call themselves “Bereaved Moms.” The first recorded case dates back to March. As of today, they say, there are still four infected babies at the Gynecology-Obstetrics Hospital of the Western National Medical Center of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS).

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Nature has perfected the art of creating living cells over billions of years. A team of researchers is now learning from that process and looking for ways to speed it up. For Massimo Vassalli, chair of bioengineering at the University of Glasgow, the goal is to understand not only how living tissues form, but how they can be recreated in the laboratory.

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