Gleanings of the Week Ending October 31, 2026
/The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.
01/23/2026 Super Age The 5 Microhabits That Rewire Your Brain for Longevity - Small, daily actions that work with your brain’s natural reward systems to create what behavioral scientists call habit loops (cues, behaviors, and rewards that, when repeated over time) rewire the brain’s baseline. These shifts aren’t just cognitive—they’re structural. Even two minutes of the right activity can nudge your brain toward a more resilient, long-lived trajectory.
10/02/2026 Inside Climate News As Negotiators Struggle to Advance a Plastics Treaty, Iran War Underscores the Urgency - Countries that comprise more than a quarter of the global plastics demand support strong measures to fight plastic pollution. But it’s unlikely to be enough to prevail over the “like-minded group” led by fossil-fuel producing nations that oppose limits on the production of plastics. The bloc, though a small minority, derailed an agreement last year because the treaty’s consensus approach allows even a single country to block a deal. No international standard governs what a country categorizes as plastic in its production, consumption and waste estimates. As a result, some countries exclude entire categories from production figures, including synthetic fibers and polyethylene terephthalate, widely used for food and beverage packaging and better known as PET.
09/22/2026 The Scientist A “Fire Amoeba” Takes First Place for Eukaryotic Heat Tolerance - Researchers recently discovered an amoeba that regularly lives at 63°C, breaking the record for the most heat-tolerant eukaryote. Incendiamoeba cascadenis, roughly translating to “fire amoeba from the Cascade mountain range,” survives and thrives in hot springs in Lassen Volcanic National Park.
10/05/2026 The New York Times The Overlapping Plagues Quietly Devastating American Forests – Wooly Adelgid (Eastern Hemlock), Emerald Ash Borer (Ash), fungus-carrying insect and microscopic worm (American Beech).
10/17/2026 Science Daily NASA discovers hidden fires burning beneath the Amazon rainforest - A dangerous wave of wildfires is spreading across the tropics, and the Amazon rainforest is now facing a growing crisis. Fueled by severe drought linked to El Niño, fires are sweeping through parts of Brazil, filling cities with smoke and threatening forests already damaged by previous fire seasons.
10/18/2026 Planetizen Connecticut is turning landfills into green infrastructure - The state has approved or built 29 solar arrays on top of capped landfills, and intends to keep building. Because the state usually prohibits shady trees from growing over landfills due to contamination risks, they often have ample access to sunlight for solar panels. Landfills are usually town-owned and have limited opportunities to be sold or put to other productive uses.
10/16/2026 My Modern Met OurNature Environmental Photo & Video Award Winners Use Storytelling to Reveal Our World and How to Protect It - The 2026 winners of the OurNature Environmental Photo & Video Award were honored at a ceremony at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest, Hungary.
10/16/2026 Smithsonian Magazine Microplastics Have Been Linked with Myriad Human Health Problems. Scientists May Have Finally Figured Out How They Harm the Body - Lab experiments suggest that tiny bits of plastic can react with water inside us to produce highly reactive molecules. They can lead to damaging oxidative stress and inflammation. When plastics degrade into microplastics—pieces smaller than a pencil-tip eraser—their surface-to-volume ratio goes up. When microplastics interact with water, they spontaneously generate unstable molecules known as reactive oxygen species. Because plastic repels water, or is hydrophobic, the surrounding water can’t form its usual hydrogen bonds. So, contact between the two substances results in electric changes that can help create volatile molecules called hydroxyl radicals. This finding implies microplastics themselves are a source of oxidative species ... and oxidative stress is not a secondary effect of exposure.
10/16/2026 The Conversation Americans want electric cars – they just can’t find them - As 2026 progressed and gas prices began to rise, so did EV demand. New EV inventories declined, shrinking from about 130 days of supply in the first quarter of 2026 to 78 days by August – just two days above the supply level of gas-burning cars. Sales stalled because there weren’t enough EVs available to buy – and there were plenty of hybrids as an alternative. Rather than move to increase electric vehicle supply and make them more affordable, federal policy continues to hinder the U.S. electric vehicle sector. As long as gas stays expensive, the gap between the electric vehicles Americans want and the electric vehicles dealers can sell them is likely to remain. Decisions such as ending the tax credit, rolling back fuel economy standards and banning Chinese technology all make it harder to build them, which means Americans will continue to have fewer affordable electric vehicles to choose from.
10/15/2026 Clean Technica If Modern Agriculture Were a Person, It Would Be a Sociopath: Can Regenerative Farming Save Us from Ourselves? - The agro-industrial sector is feeding people while harming society and starving the planet. In 1962, one farmer fed 25.8 persons; today, it is 155. But according to the UN, global agrifood systems incur roughly $12 trillion annually in hidden social and environmental costs. The Rockefeller Foundation found that in the US alone, the true costs of the food system are $3.2 trillion per year, which is three times what Americans actually pay for their food. Today, international climate scientists (represented by the IPCC) estimate that regenerating our soils could reliably offset 10% to 15% of total global emissions (4 to 5 gigatonnes of CO2 per year), with more bullish studies suggesting that soil could lock away 15 billion tons of carbon annually, thereby reducing atmospheric carbon to preindustrial levels within 20 years.
