One of the world’s most remote populations must deal with a flood of multinational plastic, much of it tossed overboard by the factory fishing ships hoovering up sealife just offshore

• Photographs by Akira Franklin

From a distance, the colourful beach at Ovahe seems a postcard-perfect mosaic of natural beauty. Craggy volcanic boulders, pockmarked from bubbling lava, jut from the sand, garnished by a necklace of pastel-coloured corals and seashells pounded to pieces by the wild, crashing surf.

As the waves pull back, however, another reality emerges. The sand holds few corals or shells. Instead, the high-tide mark is a multinational carpet of plastics polished into an array of bleached Coca-Cola reds and Pepsi blues.

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© Photograph: Akira Franklin/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Akira Franklin/The Guardian

Huge die-offs of elephant seals occurred after the virus gained nearly 20 troublesome new mutations, scientists found.

As it studies cosmic microwaves, the Simons Observatory in Chile aims to help prove or disprove cosmic inflation, a notion that the universe expanded rapidly in the moment after the Big Bang.