California Phasing Out Herbicide Linked to Parkinson’s Disease California is canceling all paraquat products, giving companies two years to sell off or destroy what’s left, after years of pressure from farmworker groups and environmental advocates. The state uses more of the herbicide than anywhere else in the country, most of it concentrated in just eight San Joaquin Valley counties. It’s already banned in over 70 countries and has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, along with kidney and lung damage. Read more at The New Lede.
We’re Getting Mealtimes Wrong, Here’s the Best Time to Have Dinner Eating dinner too late, past around 7pm for a lot of people, throws off digestion, blood sugar, and sleep more than most of us realize. Read more at BBC Future.
Wildlife in the Eastern U.S. Are Making a Comeback
Kentucky now has roughly 10,000 elk spread across a 16 county restoration zone, the largest herd east of the Mississippi, and as New England’s forests grow back in, moose, bears, fishers, and otters are quietly reclaiming ground too. Read more at Mongabay.
Barefoot Walking Improves Cognitive Ability in Adolescents
Teenagers who walked barefoot scored better on cognitive tests than kids who kept their shoes on, according to a new study. Turns out kicking off your shoes might do more than toughen up your feet. Read more via PubMed Central.
Common Sugar Appears to Loosen Cancer Cells and Help Them Spread
Cancer cells damaged by chemotherapy release fructose, and that fructose seems to help nearby, still healthy cancer cells break loose and spread, Wistar Institute researchers found. Mice on a high fructose diet developed more metastatic tumors than mice fed glucose. Read more at ScienceAlert.
Earth’s Vast Fungal Networks Are Unraveling Fast, and Scientists Are Scrambling to Understand Why
About 70 percent of Earth’s plant species rely on underground fungal networks that store carbon equal to four to six times the weight of every human on the planet. Plowing and chemical fertilizer are tearing through them, and grasslands are being converted to farmland four times faster than forests are cut down. Read more at BBC Science Cyclospora Spreads Through Human Waste, So How Did It Get on Food?
About 200 billion gallons of treated sewage wastewater goes onto US crops every year, and the standard treatment process doesn’t kill off the Cyclospora parasite. That gap is part of why an outbreak now sickening more than 22,000 people has been so hard to stop. Read more at The Conversation.
Why Are Ultra-Processed Food Firms Panicking and Suing? Because They Know Time Is Running Out UPF makers have filed 235 lawsuits against governments since 2010, nearly 600 cumulative years of litigation, and Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelez alone account for more than a third of them. The author’s read: companies sue this hard when they know the science has already turned against them, the same playbook tobacco and fossil fuel companies used. Read more at The Guardian.
The Clover Variety That’ll Fill Your Yard With Low-Maintenance Pink and White Flowers Strawberry clover spreads on its own, chokes out weeds, and shrugs off salty or clay soil that would kill a regular lawn, all while blooming pink and white from May into June. Mow it once or twice a year and you’re basically done. Read more at House Digest.
Elephants in Your Midst: In Boston, an Art Exhibit Tells the Story of an Indian Herd A hundred life-size elephant sculptures, made from an invasive weed by 300 Indigenous artisans in southern India, have taken over Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue Mall through September 13. The region they represent has the densest human-elephant overlap anywhere on Earth, and the whole thing is free to walk through. Read more at The Christian Science Monitor.
The Ornithological Artist Drawing 1,000 Birds by Hand, All for an App That Wants You Off Your Phone Keith Hansen is 420 paintings into a personal goal of hand-illustrating all 1,000 bird species recorded in the US and Canada. His work is becoming the visual backbone of Flock, an app built to nudge birders outside instead of keeping them scrolling. Read more at The Guardian.
Common Food Packaging Plastic May Contribute to Fatty Liver Disease Texas A&M researchers found that polyethylene, the plastic in food packaging and disposable bottles, worsened fatty liver disease in mice on its own, and made things considerably worse when paired with a typical Western diet. It’s mouse data so far, not human, but the mechanism they found, the plastic acting as a carrier for other toxicants, is worth watching. Read more at Newsweek.
The Second Life of Saris In Maharashtra, farmers string up their families’ old, brightly colored saris as fences to keep bison and wild boar out of their fields when the forest food supply runs low. They’re cheap, they come down easily before rice season, and photographer Indrajit Khambe has been documenting just how beautiful they look doing it. See for yourself at at Imagine5.
Sheep Wool to Make Seaweed Farming Plastic Free Queen’s University Belfast engineers grew seaweed on ropes made from sheep wool instead of plastic, and it worked at industrial scale in Norway and Iceland, a first for the industry. When harvest is done, the wool and leftover seaweed just get turned into fertilizer, instead of adding to the roughly 383 tonnes of plastic rope Norway alone loses to the ocean every year. Read more at Belfast Live.
Taxi Drivers Rarely Die of Alzheimer’s, How Complex Mental Maps and Spatial Reasoning Protect Your Brain A study of nearly 9 million death certificates found that about 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared to 1 in 60 people overall. Bus drivers and pilots, who follow fixed routes instead of navigating fresh each time, got no such benefit, pointing to real time mental mapping as the thing that’s actually protective. Read more at Nautilus.
Ultra-Processed Food Companies Hindering Health Drives by Suing Countries, Says WHO WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is calling out the same 235 lawsuits directly, saying they drain government resources and slow down public health measures even when countries eventually win. Governments have prevailed in 75 percent of resolved cases, but by the time a ruling comes down, the delay has often already done its job. Read more at The Guardian.
Transforming Farms With Holistic Design In this episode, we’re joined by Darren Doherty, internationally renowned farm designer, educator, and pioneer in regenerative agriculture. Drawing on decades of experience across diverse climates and farming systems, Darren shares why successful farm design begins with understanding the whole system—not just its individual parts.
When Dreaming Gets Your Heart Moving
Swiss researchers tracked 25 people’s brain activity during sleep and found that in the most vivid dreaming phase of REM sleep, people become more attuned to their own heartbeat, some even more so than while awake, while tuning out sounds from the outside world. It’s a small study, but it hints at why dreams feel so immersive and why you can sleep through a loud TV but still wake up for an alarm. Read more at Nautilus.
