As summer winds down in the Northern Hemisphere, daylight hours shrink and cooler temperatures arrive. The combination causes plants to slow their growth and shed their foliage—at least, that used to be the case.
A recent study in Nature Cities details how urban areas are holding onto their leaves longer than those in the countryside because of light pollution from streetlamps, billboards, office buildings, and cars. To lead this week's newsletter, Vanderbilt University's Lin Meng explains why the trend is a net negative for plants—one that could also disturb the natural processes necessary for maintaining air quality and ecosystems. The phenomenon exemplifies how cities are quietly changing nature's calendar.
Next month, governments will resume negotiations for the Pandemic Agreement's pathogen access and benefit-sharing annex in Geneva. But the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is positioned to implement the treaty's provisions before they are ratified—according to an analysis by Suerie Moon, codirector of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies' Global Health Centre, and PhD candidate Mutiara Indriani of Australian National University. Indriani and Moon state that the Pandemic Agreement offers a test of whether ASEAN can make the deal work in practice and an opportunity to influence global annex negotiations to ensure the bloc's needs are met.
To wrap up, Howard University's Otto N. Chabikuli and Harvard Medical School's Hind Satti describe the rise of medical xenophobia—the denial of essential health care based on citizenship or legal status—in Africa, where 80% of migration occurs within the continent.
Until next week! —Nsikan Akpan, Managing Editor, and Caroline Kantis, Associate Editor
