Barra Caracciolo

The new EU Soil Monitoring Directive establishes the regulatory framework for assessing soil health and mitigating critical threats like salinity and contamination in degraded soils. While it promotes nature-based solutions—such as compost amendment—for soil restoration, compost efficacy remains strictly dependent on feedstock origin and processing technologies, which influence agronomic performance and potential risks of introducing emerging contaminants into soil.

Although we have been discussing gender equality for many decades, in 2023 we have not yet reached it. When looking at science, and especially STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) research, it is clear that more efforts are needed to achieve gender equality. Women are still underrepresented in STEM research fields, with only 30% of the world's researchers being women, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

The Aliivibrio fischeri bioassay was successfully applied in order to evaluate the acute effect of sulfamethoxazole (SMX), ciprofloxacin (CIP), chlortetracycline (CTC) and copper (Cu), alone or in binary, ternary, and overall mixture. The toxicity results are reported in terms of both effective concentrations, which inhibited 50% of the bacterium bioluminescence (EC %), and in Toxic Units (TUs). The TUs were compared with predicted values obtained using the Concentration Addition model (CA).