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Most efforts to fight plastic pollution try to use less of it. An 18-year-old student from Ireland has taken a different route, designing a plastic built to help clean up the mess plastics already make. Arya Satheesh, of Letterkenny in County Donegal, was named the European regional winner of The Earth Prize 2026 for Eco Purge, a plant-based biodegradable plastic engineered to break down safely while releasing enzymes that attack microplastics in the surrounding environment. The award places her among seven regional winners chosen from roughly 4,000 entrants in what organizers call the world’s largest environmental competition for teenagers. A Plastic Designed To Clean Up After Itself The idea behind Eco Purge is to make a single material do two jobs at once. Conventional plastics linger for decades and fragment into microplastics, the tiny particles now found in oceans, soil, food and drinking water. Satheesh’s material is built to biodegrade rather than fragment, and as it breaks down it releases catalysts that help degrade other microplastic particles nearby. The mechanism rests on enzymes embedded inside the plant-based plastic as it is formed. While the product is in use, the enzymes stay stable and inert. As the material degrades, they are

A fast-moving Ebola outbreak in Central Africa has pushed the World Health Organization into one of its most demanding containment efforts in years, complicated by a viral strain that no licensed vaccine or treatment is designed to stop and by an active war zone that keeps responders from reaching the sick. The WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 16 May 2026, the highest alarm in global health. It is the 17th Ebola outbreak recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, arriving only five months after the previous one ended. What sets this episode apart is the pathogen behind it. A Rare Strain With No Licensed Vaccine The outbreak is driven by the Bundibugyo ebolavirus, a rarer species than the Zaire ebolavirus that existing Ebola treatments and vaccines were built to fight. That distinction is the central problem facing responders. The licensed tools stockpiled from past epidemics, including Merck’s Ervebo vaccine, target the Zaire strain, and there is no approved therapy or vaccine specific to Bundibugyo. The virus carries an estimated fatality rate of between 25% and 50%. Scientists are weighing whether Ervebo might offer partial cross-protection, though animal data are mixed and questions

A bispecific antibody developed in China has done something no drug had managed before: beaten the established immunotherapy standard for a common form of lung cancer in a head-to-head trial. Akeso announced on May 31 that ivonescimab, paired with chemotherapy, produced a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in overall survival as a first-line treatment for advanced squamous non-small cell lung cancer in the Phase III HARMONi-6 study. The result, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago and published simultaneously in The Lancet, lands as both a clinical milestone and a marker of how far Chinese biotech has come. What The Trial Showed The headline figure is a sharp one. In the intent-to-treat population, ivonescimab plus chemotherapy reduced the risk of death by 34% versus tislelizumab plus chemotherapy, with a hazard ratio of 0.66 and a p-value of 0.0017. Patients on ivonescimab lived a median of about 28 months after enrollment, compared with 24 months for the control group. The study enrolled 532 patients, roughly 63% of whom had centrally located squamous tumors, a notably difficult-to-treat group. That four-month survival gain carries weight in a disease where progress has been incremental. Oncologists described the extension

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have built a miniature, living model of the human brain and spinal cord that challenges one of neuroscience’s hardest limits: the idea that damage to central nervous system connections is permanent. Using the model, the team showed that the lost ability of nerve fibers to regrow can be switched back on, opening a long-term avenue toward treating conditions such as spinal cord injury, motor neurone disease, and multiple sclerosis. The findings, published May 28 in Cell Reports, do not amount to a treatment. They come from organoids grown in a dish, not from patients. But they reframe a problem that has stood in the way of repair for decades, and they identify a specific biological mechanism that future therapies might target. Building A Connected Nervous System In A Dish The human brain and spinal cord are distinct tissues joined by axons, the long nerve fibers that carry movement signals. To recreate that architecture, the researchers grew brain and spinal cord organoids from human stem cells and deliberately kept them apart. Over time, nerve fibers from the brain tissue reached across the gap, connected to the spinal cord, and formed a working circuit capable of

The World Health Organization on Sunday, May 17, 2026, declared the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the agency’s highest-level alarm and a designation reserved for events that require coordinated international response. The declaration by Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cited rising case counts, confirmed cross-border transmission, and significant uncertainties about the true scale of the epidemic. The outbreak is driven by the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola virus, a rare member of the Orthoebolavirus family for which no vaccines or therapeutics have been approved. Only two prior outbreaks of the Bundibugyo strain have been recorded, making the current episode the third in history caused by this particular pathogen. The Numbers on the Ground As of May 16, health authorities had recorded at least 10 laboratory-confirmed cases, 336 suspected cases, and 88 suspected deaths in Ituri Province in eastern DRC, according to figures cited by the WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is supporting the local response. Subsequent WHO reporting also referenced eight laboratory-confirmed cases, 246 suspected cases, and 80 suspected deaths in earlier official summaries, with figures evolving as additional samples are

Annual statistics report finds the world off track for every health-related UN development goal as gains slow and some indicators move backward The World Health Organization warned this week that a decade of global health progress is stalling and, in some areas, reversing, leaving the world off track to meet any of the health-related United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The assessment came in the WHO’s World Health Statistics 2026 report, published Wednesday in Geneva, the agency’s annual compilation of health indicators drawn from around the world. The report’s framing was deliberately cautionary. While it documented meaningful improvements over the past decade, it concluded that persistent and emerging challenges have left progress, in the WHO’s words, fragile and insufficient. Yukiko Nakatani, the WHO’s assistant director general for health systems, told a press conference that the findings should be read as “sobering.” Where Progress Is Slipping The clearest warning signs are in areas where hard-won gains are losing momentum or unwinding. The report found that malaria incidence has increased. Measles vaccine coverage remains below the threshold needed to prevent outbreaks, leaving populations exposed to a disease that public health systems had once pushed to the margins. The decline in maternal

The World Health Organization is coordinating a multi-country response to a hantavirus outbreak that began aboard a Dutch-flagged cruise ship in the South Atlantic, with cases or close contacts now traced across more than 12 countries on four continents. Eight infections, including three deaths, have been linked to the MV Hondius, operated by Oceanwide Expeditions, after the vessel departed Argentina in early April for what was meant to be a remote-island expedition cruise. The international scramble to identify potentially exposed travelers reflects the geographically dispersed nature of cruise tourism, where passengers from dozens of nationalities can disembark at multiple ports before any outbreak is recognized. While the WHO has assessed the global public health risk as low, the response has drawn comparisons to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when slow tracing of disembarked passengers complicated containment. The Andes Virus and Why This Outbreak Is Different Five of the eight reported cases have been laboratory-confirmed as the Andes virus, a rare strain of hantavirus endemic to parts of South America. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Andes virus is the only hantavirus species documented as capable of limited human-to-human transmission, typically through close and

Three passengers aboard the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged cruise ship operated by Oceanwide Expeditions, have died during a suspected hantavirus outbreak in the Atlantic Ocean. The World Health Organization confirmed the deaths on Sunday, May 3, while stressing that the risk to the general public remains low. One case of hantavirus infection has been laboratory confirmed, with five additional suspected cases. Of the six affected individuals, three have died and one is currently in intensive care in South Africa. The Voyage and the Victims The MV Hondius departed Ushuaia in Argentina over a month ago, making stops in Antarctica before leaving again on April 1. It then stopped at the British overseas territory of Saint Helena before anchoring off Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. The first of the deceased was a 70-year-old passenger who died on board. His body was transferred to the island of Saint Helena. His 69-year-old wife also fell ill on board and was evacuated to South Africa, where she died at a Johannesburg hospital. A third victim, a German national, also died, though the official cause of death has not yet been established. After the ship left Saint Helena, a British national fell sick on