Scientists in Israel have discovered a new part of the human immune system, shedding light on a potential “untapped source of natural antibiotics.” The research focuses on protaesomes, structures inside cells that, according to the Israel Cancer Research Fund, essentially function as “cellular garbage cans,” helping remove “unwanted or damaged proteins and helping the immune system recognize harmful invaders and cancer cells.”
Now, as detailed in the scientific journal Nature and illuminated by the BBC, the new study has “addressed a question that remained unanswered for decades,” showing that proteasomes can detect bacteria in cells—and then use old proteins as defense against that bacteria.”
“These findings pave the way for previously undescribed diagnostic and therapeutic strategies in the fight against infectious diseases,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
Yifat Merbl, a researcher and professor from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, called the results “really exciting,” telling the BBC, “[W]e never knew that this was happening. […] We discovered a novel mechanism of immunity that is allowing us to have a [defense] against bacterial infection. […] It’s happening throughout our body in all the cells, and generates a whole new class of potential natural antibiotics.”
The discovery process, likened to “dumpster diving,” led to tests involving lab-grown bacteria and mice with pneumonia and sepsis.
“Experiments in these mice showed that treatment with a proteasome-derived peptide significantly reduced the number of bacteria, lessened tissue damage, and even improved survival rates,” according to the Weizmann Institute’s news release. “The results surprised the researchers for two reasons. First, they showed that a single peptide that is naturally made by the body can prove effective against a life-threatening condition when administered in large amounts. Second, the results of the treatment were comparable to those of treatment with strong antibiotics in clinical use.”
Professor Daniel Davis, an immunologist at Imperial College London, told the BBC that the discoveries are “extremely provocative and very interesting,” while noting that the possibility of another source of antibiotics “still needs to be tested” and would require patience.
“This study highlights how technological innovation and basic research intertwine in unforeseen ways,” Merbl said in the news release. “Without the technology that allowed us to analyze the cellular trash, we would not have made this discovery, but when we developed this technology, we never imagined that we would uncover a new immune mechanism.”
Hopefully these findings will spur further research in the fight against superbugs resistant to currently available drugs. Antimicrobial resistance is a major ongoing concern—according to the World Health Organization, bacterial AMR “was directly responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to 4.95 million deaths.”
Professor Merbl, who studied at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Harvard University, joined Weizmann as a Senior Scientist in 2014 and served as the scientific co-founder of Promise Bio, a company utilizing “a cloud-based AI platform that performs unbiased, broad-range epiproteomic analyses on standard mass-spectrometry data.”
In May 2024, the Israel Cancer Research Fund partnered with the Cancer Research Institute to fund Merbl’s work. Her lab team previously received a $200,000 CRI-ICRF Technology Impact Award, along with the 2024 Rappaport Prize for Excellence in Biomedical Research.
Whether it’s a forest recovering from a wildfire or our own backyards, nature can use some help. Spreading seeds to ensure grass or wildflower growth can be a time-intensive process. However, there is one way that can be fun, quick, and help your dog get some exercise: strapping a backpack full of seeds onto them.
The practice has been popularized internationally by sisters Francisca and Constanza Torres with their three dogs. Many forested areas of their native Chile were devastated by wildfires. The sisters came up with a plan to help reseed and regrow what had been burned down. The two would strap backpacks filled with grass and wildflowers seeds onto their border collies. The backpack had a small opening that would allow the seeds to fall out and spread as their dogs ran, jumped, and played throughout the area.
This helped the forests regrow while also providing the dogs exercise. The dogs were also able to walk into nooks and crannies human planters normally can’t access.
An idea goes international
The idea spread past countries and coastlines as a nature reserve in Lewes, East Sussex, England offered dog walkers backpacks with seeds. The walkers would strap the packs onto their furry friends as they went on nature walks to help rewild the area.
“We’re really interested in rewilding processes, but they often involve reintroducing big herbivores like bison or wild horses,” said the project’s manager Dylan Walker to The Guardian in 2024. “In a smaller urban nature reserve it’s really hard to do those things. So, to replicate the effect that those animals have on the ecosystem we aimed to utilize the vast number of dog walkers that are visiting the nature reserve daily.”
The concept itself was taken from nature. For centuries, wolves would have seeds caught in their fur. Over time, movement, and grooming, the seeds would be spread throughout other areas of the forest. The wolves acted as natural carriers for seeds much like bees are for pollen.
Reseed your garden with Rover
This technique doesn’t have to be reserved for wildfire recovery or regrowing public gardens. Your yard could benefit from it, too. While you could find a pack for your pup and fill it with seeds, there’s another way. Gardener Patrick Vernuccio suggests just filling a tea strainer with seeds and clipping it onto your dog’s collar. It should perform the same effect.
How your Dog can rewild a garden by sowing seeds for Pollinators 🌸🐾🐝 My dog loves to hang out in the garden and now she can also spread out & sow seeds that are beneficial for biodiversity 😍 I use a tea strainer and wildflower seeds for pollinators. 💚 Simply place the seeds inside the tea strainer and close it. 💚 With movement, the seeds will fall off the tea strainer. 💚 Attach it to your dog’s collar and enjoy together some nice time in the garden. And while exploring the garden, your dog will spread out seeds which will give birth to wildflowers, feeding the bees and pollinators. Perfect to rewild the garden and do this before a rainy day to ensure germination or water your garden at sunset. You can easily adapt this technique by using other strainers for bigger seeds. Dogs are definitely man’s best friend and soon, bee’s best friend too 💚 Thank you Bonnie! Green love to you and to your dog! #bee#wildflowers#gardeninglife#dogsoftiktok#rewilding
If you have your dog help seed your yard, be sure that the plants you hope to grow are dog-friendly. Use non-toxic seeds for dogs such as roses, marigolds, and pansies among others. The ASPCA has a full list of plants that are unsafe for dogs to refer to when you’re unsure.
Man’s best friend can also be man’s best gardening buddy.
According to UNICEF, over two billion people live in an area with water scarcity. Climate change, data centers, and other factors are impacting the amount of drinkable water available. However, for the last ten years the women of Morocco have been implementing a water collecting technology that could be useful in other dry areas.
For centuries, the people of Aït Baamrane in Morocco relied on rain and groundwater from wells for drinking and irrigation. It is reported that women of the town would walk four hours to fetch 50-gallon drums of water to carry back. However, intense drought and desertification have made the region even more difficult to live in. Now, they primarily rely on “fog harvesting” for water, with technique showing remarkable success since they started in 2010.
The women-led NGO Dar Si Hmad built what is now the world’s largest operational fog-water harvesting system. This not only has successfully provided an average of 6,300 liters of potable water for more than 400 people in five villages in the area, but significantly reduced the time and physical cost of carrying water.
How fog harvesting works
Fog harvesting is the collection of water droplets from wind-driven fog. While Morocco is a dry area, it does have fog near its mountains and coastal regions. The fog collection system is typically constructed in the form of a mesh net set up and pulled taut between two posts. The net is spread out at an angle that’s perpendicular to the direction of the wind carrying the fog. Freshwater droplets are formed as the fog passes through the net, dripping into a gutter that leads to a storage tank.
The fog-water collected in this particular system goes through a thorough UV, sand, and cartridge filtering process. The system is also solar powered, making it environmentally sound and cheaper than other methods. Since the collected water is pure from the sky, it is free of most contaminants and pollutants.
Fog harvesting expanding
Fog-harvesting/fog-catching has since expanded to other areas of the world. Movimiento Peruanos Sin Agua (Movement of Peruvians without Water) haven’t just built fog-catching nets in Peru, but in rural communities in Colombia, Bolivia, and Mexico. Fog-collectors in Spain collect droplets and water to help offset dry vegetation wildfires on the Canary Islands. Chilean fog harvesters are looking into expansion to help provide water for the poorest communities and dry urban areas.
Other water collecting methods are being tested
Scientists are also trying to find other methods to quickly and effectively draw water from the atmosphere. Researchers at MIT have developed a salt-based hydrogel that collects moisture from water vapor at night between glass panels. These panels create condensation of pure water when they are heated by sunlight. There is also research going into a sonic device that can quickly “shake water out of the atmosphere.”
While scientists are in the midst of finding ways to obtain and conserve water in our future, there are steps people can take today. In terms of water conservation in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has some resources that can help. Like collecting fog, collecting folks willing to pitch in can do wonders for the community.
Sadly, bat populations are declining rapidly in North America. A driving force is a fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome, which has spread among bats throughout the United States. When a bat population crashes, fewer bats are around to eat bothersome insects. All those additional insects can do serious damage.
A reproductive female big brown bat can eat its body weight in insects every night in the summer, precisely when farmers are growing food.
Mexican free-tailed bats head out of Bracken Bat Cave, near San Antonio, Texas, for an evening of feasting on insects. In summer, the cave is home to the largest bat colony in the world. Ann Froschauer/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Farmers experience economic damage when rootworm concentrations exceed about 0.5 per corn plant. Typical planting densities exceed 30,000 corn plants per acre in the Midwest. Therefore, the rootworms that would have hatched could damage more than 2,000 acres of corn – if bats weren’t around to eat the cucumber beetles first.
That is a significant amount of pest control provided by bats!
The disaster known as white-nose syndrome
In the winter of 2006, the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome, the aptly named Pseudogymnoascus destructans, was first detected in the U.S. near Albany, New York.
From there, it spread across the country, infecting 12 species of bats, three of which are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. A 2010 study found white-nose syndrome had killed between 30% and 99% of the bats in infected colonies.
As of March 2026, the fungus causing white-nose syndrome had been detected in 47 states, reaching as far west as California, Washington and Oregon. White-nose syndrome spreads primarily through bat-to-bat contact, though humans also contribute to the spread when cave explorers carry the fungus from one cave to another.
Despite coordinated efforts by state and federal wildlife agencies to limit access to caves where bats live and slow the transmission, white-nose syndrome continues to spread rapidly. When bats get infected, they wake up early from hibernation and use more energy over the winter. This depletes their fat reserves and causes them to die of starvation, leading to plummeting populations.
Bats’ role in food production
After white-nose syndrome arrives in an area, the loss of bats has significant consequences for farmers.
Yields fall as pests consume crops. To protect their crops, farmers purchase more chemical pesticides, so their costs rise as yields decline. The estimated agricultural losses from white-nose syndrome exceeded $420 million per year as of 2017.
A lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae) feeding on an agave blossom in Arizona, spreading the flower’s pollen in the process. Rolf Nussbaumer/imageBROKER
Counties in all U.S. states tax agricultural land based on its “use value” – in other words, based on how profitable the land is in agriculture. Without healthy bat populations, lower profits shrink the tax base, leaving county governments with less revenue.
Those governments must respond by reducing services, raising taxes or increasing how much money they borrow – often at a greater cost of borrowing. The effect is especially pronounced in rural counties, where agriculture makes up a large share of property tax revenue.
Our recent research finds that rural county governments lost almost $150 per person in annual revenue after the arrival of white-nose syndrome. For an average-size rural county, that is nearly $2.7 million in lost revenue each year.
How losing bats can hit the bond markets
The loss of county revenue makes municipal bond investors nervous. Buying a municipal bond is a bit like lending money to the county, and the interest rate is what the county pays you for taking on that risk.
When bats disappear, the risk goes up, and the county has to pay about 11.47 hundredths of a percentage point more in interest. That may sound small, but it is 27% larger than the typical risk premium investors already demand from county governments.
The higher interest rate raises borrowing costs for county governments. For example, the borrowing costs on a typical 15-year, $1 million bond would increase by more than $33,000.
Bats snuggle up in a cave. Liz Hamrick/TVA
Higher yields also mean lower bond prices for investors, including retirement funds. For example, our research suggests that investors would discount a $1 million bond issued by a rural county by nearly $14,000 if that county’s bats have become infected by white-nose syndrome.
Economic benefits of saving bats
The good news is that the benefits from healthy bat populations create opportunities to make money from bat conservation.
Farmers can increase their incomes. Local governments can recover property tax revenue to fund public services, such as road maintenance, health infrastructure and public schools. Bond investors can earn financial returns from healthier bat populations.
No silver bullet exists for protecting or restoring bat populations affected by white-nose syndrome, but promising efforts are underway.
A fungal vaccine is being tested by the U.S. Geological Survey and partners. Designing artificial roosts and adding cave protections can also help preserve healthy bat populations. Researchers are also working to better understand bat resistance to the disease to explore whether improving resistance alone can stabilize bat populations.
As these solutions develop, opportunities will emerge for farmers, local governments and investors to earn financial returns through bat conservation. In other words, saving bats isn’t just good ecology – it’s good economics.
