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What if the experts have been doing nature restoration, health, and chemistry completely wrong?
The Point by Modern Sciences - June 10, 2026
Don Smith
June 10, 2026
By The Modern Sciences Team | June 10, 2026 |
It’s Wednesday again, Cultivators of Curiosity!
Sometimes the most useful thing a scientist can do is tell you that a widely accepted approach is wrong. This issue of The Point by Modern Sciences features three of those moments.
A landmark study on ecological restoration finds that the projects most likely to succeed are the ones governments are least likely to run. A chemist at the University of Glasgow argues that chemistry, one of humanity's oldest sciences, has never actually gone digital, and that AI alone won't fix it. And a physiologist makes the case that weight loss is the wrong goal for almost everyone making health resolutions. Three fields, and three course corrections worth knowing about.
NATURE
Why restoring nature can work so much more effectively when led by local people
Global pledges to restore over a billion hectares of degraded land sound ambitious, but top-down restoration projects imposed without community input are failing. New research identifies four levels of local involvement in ecological restoration, and finds that initiatives led by Indigenous and local communities consistently deliver better outcomes for both people and the planet.
The Point:
Top-down restoration is failing people and ecosystems alike: Research spanning projects from the English fens to the Brazilian Amazon found that government and private restoration programs focused on tree-planting targets and species reintroduction routinely fall short when they ignore the knowledge, livelihoods, and rights of the communities closest to the land.
Four distinct levels of community involvement determine whether restoration succeeds or harms: From fully imposed exclusionary approaches, which have led to Indigenous evictions in Kenya, to just and transformative models centered on local values, the degree to which communities shape the process directly predicts how durable and beneficial the outcomes are.
With a billion hectares pledged for restoration by 2030, the stakes for getting this right are enormous: Researchers argue that restoring local communities as custodians of nature, not just participants in someone else's plan, is the path toward both genuine ecological recovery and environmental justice on a global scale.
HEALTH AND THE BODY
Five ways to improve your health this year that don’t rely on losing weight
Every January, weight loss dominates health resolutions. However, research shows most quick-fix diets don't last. A physiologist at the University of Lincoln argues that five evidence-based habits offer more reliable, sustainable health improvements than chasing the scale: eating more plants, exercising consistently, managing stress, prioritizing sleep, and cutting back on alcohol. None of them require losing a single kilogram.
The Point:
Weight loss is an unreliable target for lasting health improvement: Research consistently shows that most people who pursue quick-fix diet plans do not sustain the results, and focusing on weight alone obscures the habits that actually drive long-term health across a much wider set of markers.
Five evidence-based habits deliver measurable benefits regardless of what the scale says: Eating more plant foods, exercising consistently, managing stress, prioritizing sleep, and moderating alcohol intake each independently improve cardiovascular health, immune function, mental wellbeing, and disease risk in ways that have nothing to do with body weight.
The best health resolution is one you can actually keep: Whether it is adding an extra serving of vegetables, walking part of your commute, or cutting back on late-night drinks, small and realistic changes compounded over a full year add up to meaningful improvements in health — no gym membership or crash diet required.
MATH AND THE SCIENCES
Chemistry is stuck in the dark ages – ‘chemputation’ can bring it into the digital world
Despite living in an era of AI and robotics, chemistry still runs on manual, craft-based workflows that haven't fundamentally changed in centuries. A researcher at the University of Glasgow argues that the solution is chemputation, a programmable, machine-readable language for chemistry that treats reagents as data and reactions as executable code, unlocking reproducibility, automation, and truly digital molecular discovery.
The Point:
Chemistry's core workflow is still essentially manual—and that's holding back science: Despite advances in AI and robotics, chemical synthesis is still largely designed and executed by hand, lab by lab, with results published as prose that cannot be reliably reproduced elsewhere, making modern chemistry more artisanal craft than digital science.
Chemputation proposes making chemistry programmable for the first time: Developed at the University of Glasgow, the approach encodes chemical synthesis as executable digital instructions , with reagents as data, operations as code, and real-time error correction, so that a synthesis can be shared, run, and reproduced on different machines anywhere in the world.
The launch of the world's first chemifarm marks a turning point for digital molecular discovery: Opened in Glasgow in June 2025 by university spin-out Chemify, the facility applies chemputation alongside AI and robotics in a self-learning system, transforming drug and materials discovery from a linear gamble into an iterative, programmable process.