For the fifth time, pumpkin legend Travis Gienger won the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh Off today in Half Moon Bay, California. The gigantic gourd named Rocky weighed 2,389 pounds. It could be baked into approximately 1,194 pumpkin pies, and weighs about the same as an American bison (Bison bison) or a 2015 Chevy Spark.
The biggest gourd from this event tipped the scales 2,749 pounds and was grown by Gienger in 2023. On October 10, a new world record was set at the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers Weigh-Off. Ron Wallace of Greene, Rhode Island’s pumpkin weighed 3,156 pounds, beating the previous record-holder by about 300 pounds.
As champion, Geigner will earn $9 per pound in prize money, so $21,900 total. He also will receive a Pumpkin King Champion Ring, the Mel Mello Sr. Grand Champion Growers Jacket, and other honors.
The 53rd annual event also featured a special appearance and carving by legendary pumpkin carver and farmer Mike Valladao. Affectionately called the “Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers,” the gourd artist commemorated his 40 years at the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival.
The pumpkin that Mike Vallado carved during the festivities. Image: Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh Offvia Facebook.
The event began in 1974 as a friendly challenge between Half Moon Bay, California, and Circleville, Ohio, to see who could grow the biggest pumpkin. Half Moon Bay won that first showdown with a pumpkin weighing only 132 pounds. Today’s mega gourds can weigh more than 20 times as much. The event has also become an annual pilgrimage for the pumpkin growers who spend months nurturing their enormous Atlantic giants (Cucurbita maxima). These jumbo gourds sometimes gain dozens of pounds in a single day during peak growing season (August through September).
The event is an officially sanctioned Great Pumpkin Commonwealth competition, with weighing and inspection officiated by the GPC and San Mateo County Department of Agriculture Office of Weights and Measures.
Anyone who’s seen the 1986 musical comedy, Little Shop of Horrors, is familiar with Audrey II. Audrey II looks like a towering, blood-eating Venus flytrap plant, even mimicking the jaw-like, snapping pod of real carnivorous plants. But while Venus flytraps consume insects, Audrey II feeds on humans.
On the other hand, plants that trap and digest bugs and, on occasion, small rodents are not only real, but actually quite diverse. Popular Science turned to Coogan to find out why some plants are carnivorous, while others simply soak up their necessary nutrients straight from the soil. We also asked Coogan to dig into all the details behind what makes these plants deadly, at least to birds and other small animals.
What are carnivorous plants?
Carnivorous plants are predatory flowering plants that attract, catch, and absorb animals for their nutrients. They’re both autotrophs, which are organisms that make their own food using light or chemical energy, and heterotrophs. This means that they also have to eat animal prey to survive.
“Carnivorous plants photosynthesize,” says Coogan. “They can use the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar,” he says, for substance. “They’re just getting some extra minerals or nutrients from the bugs or the organisms that they eat.”
In the 1986 film Little Shop of Horrors, a giant Venus flytrap-like plant proves deadly. Video: Little Shop of Horrors 4K | Seymour’s TV Interview Goes Horribly Wrong, Warner Bros. Entertainment
Meat-eating plants exist on every continent save Antarctica, and grow in sun-filled places with extremely poor, acidic, and nutrient-free soil. For instance, the bogs, swamps, and marshes of North Carolina and Florida, with their unique combination of sunlight and wetlands, allow these uniquely adapted flora to thrive. This includes Venus flytraps, which are native only to the U.S. Carolinas, and Tracy’s sundew, with its long, thread-like leaves that grow in spirals. It’s often seen blooming alongsidecarnivorous pitcher plants in the Florida Panhandle.
“Carnivory is primarily an adaptation for plants to get nutrients in low nutrient environments,” says Coogan. Carnivorous plants feed on insects to obtain the nitrogen, phosphorus, and other organic nutrients they need to survive, but are unable to absorb from the soil.
This isn’t to say that all plants that grow within poor-soil wetlands are carnivores. Take wiregrass, which is quite prominent in the southeast. “It has really heavy root systems,” says Coogan, which have formed a symbiotic or long-term relationship with mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi attach to the wiregrass roots and help them form nutrients from the region’s poor, sandy soils.
“There’s only a certain number of niches to be filled in an ecosystem, so some plants went one way,” meaning they became carnivores, “and then some plants went the other way.”
How did carnivorous plants evolve?
There are an estimated 800 to 860 species of carnivorous plants worldwide, with new species constantly being discovered. In fact, in the more than 140 million years that flowering plants have been around, carnivory has evolved independently at least a dozen times.
Carnivory is not inherited from a single meat-eating plant ancestor. Instead, carnivorous plants’ highly adapted leaf structures, which include sticky traps, snap traps, and pitfall traps for catching insects, have evolved and diversified more recently, largely between eight and 72 million years ago.
Carnivorous plants are a classic example of convergent evolution. This means that unrelated lineages have all developed similar traits separate from one another to adapt to their sunny, waterlogged, and nutrient-poor environments.
For example, “There are many different kinds of pitcher plants,” carnivorous plants that have hollowed-out pitcher-shaped leaves that act as pitfalls, says Coogan, and they’re completely unrelated. You’ve got low-growing Australian pitcher plants, which are evolutionarily closer to roses, beans, and broccoli, Asian pitcher plants that hang from tropical vines, and upright, trumpet-like North American pitcher plants. Despite their completely different DNA, they’ve all evolved the exact same, tube-shaped “pitfall trap,” says Coogan, to catch and digest insects.
Through convergent evolution, unrelated carnivorous plants like Venus flytraps, sundews, and pitcher plants have also independently repurposed ancient self-defense genes into ingenious digestive tools. While noncarnivorous plants have long used enzymes, called chitinases, to fight off fungal infections, carnivorous plants do the opposite. They use chitinases to break down the tough, chitin-rich exoskeletons of trapped insects. This then allows them to absorb vital nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, transforming what were originally passive, protective enzymes into active weaponry.
Are carnivorous plants harmful to larger organisms?
“I would say ‘no,’’ says Coogan. Almost all carnivorous plants feed exclusively on small insects like flies, mosquitoes, and spiders.
While there are some, like giant pitcher plants, that grow large enough to trap and digest small animals like rats and shrews, “the relationship is more mutualistic,” meaning both species benefit from each other.
This type of pitcher plant are the largest in the world and often consume small mammals. Image: Austin American-Statesman/Hearst Newspapers / Contributor / Getty Images Sara Diggins
Basically giant pitcher plant species produce a sweet, aromatic nectar on the underside of their pitcher lids that attracts small mammals. These mammals “sit on the lid of the pitcher plant to drink the exudate, which is a thick nectar-like substance,” says Coogan.
They’ll often defecate into the plant while feeding, and the giant pitcher absorbs nutrient-rich nitrogen and phosphorus directly from the droppings. It’s a win-win for both parties. “And one of many examples of mutualism in carnivorous plants.” If a small animal accidently falls in, the pitcher plant will then use its acidic digestive enzymes to consume it.
Some incredible carnivorous plants
Coogan’s favorite carnivorous plants run the gamut from small, semi-aquatic Genlisea, commonly known as corkscrew plants, to bladderwort, tiny, bladder-shaped traps that catch small, aquatic creatures and often resemble orchids.
“There are over 200 species of them,” he says, “and they come in three different habitat types. You have fully aquatic bladderwort that are floating in water. You have terrestrial ones that live in kind of soggy soils, and then you also have epiphytic ones that are living in trees and in moss.” They all use ultra-quick, vacuum-driven suction traps to capture prey.
In fact, bladderwort is one of the fastest predatory plants on Earth, and can suck in its prey in less than one millisecond. “The real reason I like them is because they are proliferous, meaning they flower en masse.”
Also popular: butterwarts. “Especially the Mexican butterworts or Pinguicula,” says Coogan. “The reason is that they’re excellent house plants. They look like succulents, but their leaves are sticky and they eat fruit flies and fungus gnats.” They act as a natural form of pest control.
What’s the largest carnivorous plant?
The world’s largest carnivorous plant by trap volume is the giant montane pitcher plant. It’s endemic to Malaysian Borneo and features massive urn-shaped traps that can grow up to 16 inches tall and eight inches wide. While lizards, frogs, and birds do occasionally fall victim to the plant’s digestive enzymes and acids, most wildlife is in the clear.
Humans can also count themselves safe, Audrey II aside.
In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.
Frost is one of the most punishing adversaries of tea cultivation. A single cold snap can scorch tender leaves, derail an entire season’s harvest, and degrade the delicate chemistry that gives tea its value. For growers and breeders, however, judging how badly a field has been damaged has long been a stubbornly subjective exercise: visual ratings lump continuous injury into crude categories, and laboratory assays destroy the very tissue they measure. A new study published in Plant Methods by Zhengtong He of Shihezi University, Zhiwei Chen of the Tea Research Institute of Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and colleagues offers a way out, pairing hyperspectral imaging with a purpose-built deep learning model to read frost damage directly from the way leaves reflect light.
The core problem the team confronted is that frost injury is not a binary event but a continuum. Leaves exposed to sub-zero temperatures suffer a cascade of overlapping stresses: photosynthetic pigments degrade, the machinery of photosynthesis falters, and cell membranes and walls break down. Any single measurement captures only a sliver of that cascade. To capture the whole picture, the researchers collected hyperspectral data together with eight key physicochemical indicators from tea plants growing across natural frost damage gradients in the field, rather than in the artificial conditions of a growth chamber. From these multidimensional physiological responses they constructed a composite measure, the tea cold stress response index, or TCSRI, which expresses frost damage severity as a continuous value instead of a coarse visual class.
Building TCSRI is a meaningful advance in itself. Traditional frost assessment often relies on ordinal scales, where an observer assigns a score of mild, moderate, or severe. Such scales throw away information and make it difficult to track recovery or compare cultivars with fine precision. By integrating several physiological dimensions into one index, the team created a target variable that reflects the plant’s actual internal state. The challenge then became predicting that index, and the individual chemical indicators behind it, from spectral data alone, without touching or destroying a single leaf.
Hyperspectral sensing is well suited to this task in principle. Across hundreds of narrow wavelength bands, plant leaves encode a wealth of information: chlorophyll absorption in the visible range, water and structural features in the near infrared. But the data are high-dimensional, with far more spectral channels than samples, a regime that invites overfitting, especially in field studies where collecting ground-truth measurements is laborious. Conventional chemometric approaches, from partial least squares regression to standard machine learning pipelines, often struggle to separate genuine physiological signals from noise, sensor drift, and the confounding effects of leaf surface properties and illumination variation.
The researchers’ answer is a model they call STAMPformer, short for spectral-prior-guided multi-view attention pooling. Its architecture reflects a deliberate design philosophy: rather than letting a neural network rediscover everything from scratch, the model is steered by what spectroscopists already know about how plants respond to stress. At its front end, a parameter-free attention convolution extraction module jointly models both the raw reflectance spectra and their first-order derivatives. Derivative spectra are a classic spectral prior: they accentuate subtle local features such as absorption peaks and shoulders that are easily drowned out in raw reflectance, while suppressing broad baseline drift and noise. By processing both views together, the module sharpens the local spectral signatures that carry physiological meaning.
On top of this extraction stage sits the second innovation, a multi-view attention pooling module. Deep networks processing spectral sequences produce long streams of features, but not all wavelengths matter equally for a given prediction. The pooling module adaptively aggregates sequence features drawn from different feature subspaces, learning to amplify the responses that are most diagnostic of cold stress and to down-weight the rest. This attention mechanism acts like a learned spotlight, and because it operates across multiple subspaces, it can capture complementary patterns that a single attention head might miss. The result is a compact representation tailored to the prediction task at hand, whether that is estimating a specific chemical indicator or the composite TCSRI.
The performance numbers are striking. Across all nine prediction tasks, spanning the eight physicochemical indicators and the TCSRI itself, STAMPformer achieved coefficients of determination above 0.87 and ratios of performance to deviation above 2.80, thresholds generally regarded as indicating reliable quantitative prediction. In other words, from a leaf’s reflectance fingerprint alone, the model could reconstruct the plant’s internal frost-stress state with an accuracy that approaches laboratory measurement, while remaining entirely non-destructive. The team did not stop at headline metrics. Ablation experiments systematically removed each proposed module to confirm that both the attention convolution extraction and the multi-view pooling contributed measurably to the gains, and paired statistical tests across multiple random seeds ensured the improvements were not artifacts of a lucky initialization.
Interpretability was a further priority, and here the study delivers something rarer than raw accuracy. Applying SHAP analysis, a technique that attributes each prediction to the contributions of individual input features, the researchers identified the wavelengths the model relied on most heavily. These key spectral regions correspond to physiologically meaningful processes: pigment degradation, photosynthetic impairment, and the disruption of cellular structure. That alignment between machine attention and plant biology matters on two fronts. It gives spectroscopists confidence that the model has learned genuine stress signatures rather than spurious correlations, and it hands plant physiologists a data-driven map of which parts of the spectrum track which facets of cold injury, potentially guiding future sensor design and breeding assays.
Crucially, the model also proved itself on data it had never seen. Independent external validation, using samples not involved in training, demonstrated that STAMPformer’s predictive ability generalizes beyond its original dataset, addressing one of the most common failure modes of machine learning in agricultural sensing. For a field where models are often tuned and tested on the same plots, this external check is an important credibility marker, suggesting the framework could be deployed across different farms, seasons, and frost events rather than remaining a laboratory curiosity.
The practical implications reach well beyond tea. An accurate, non-destructive, continuous measure of cold damage opens the door to rapid post-frost field surveys, letting growers quantify losses within hours instead of waiting for symptoms to develop or sending samples to a lab. For breeders screening for cold-tolerant germplasm, a spectral readout of TCSRI could accelerate the evaluation of hundreds of candidate lines without destructive sampling. And in the emerging vision of the smart tea garden, where drones and handheld spectrometers roam the rows, a model like STAMPformer could feed real-time frost maps into irrigation, shading, and recovery-management decisions. The authors frame their work as supporting frost monitoring, cold-tolerant germplasm evaluation, and intelligent garden management, and the architecture’s reliance on general spectral priors rather than tea-specific tricks suggests the approach could be adapted to other crops facing abiotic stress. As climate variability makes late-season frosts increasingly erratic, tools that turn light reflected from a leaf into a precise physiological diagnosis may become as essential to the tea garden as the thermometer.
Subject of Research: Hyperspectral deep learning prediction of continuous frost damage severity in tea plants
Article Title: STAMPformer: spectral-prior-guided multi-view attention learning for hyperspectral prediction of continuous frost damage severity in field-grown tea plants
Article References: He, Z., Chen, Z., Ding, Z., Wang, Z., Zhang, F., Zhao, Y., & Dong, C. (2026). STAMPformer: spectral-prior-guided multi-view attention learning for hyperspectral prediction of continuous frost damage severity in field-grown tea plants. Plant Methods. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13007-026-01597-4
La Côte d’Ivoire a lancé, le 1er septembre, sa campagne 2026-2027 de commercialisation du cacao, avec de nouvelles obligations de traçabilité. Premier produit d’exportation du pays, le cacao occupe une place centrale dans l’économie ivoirienne. Au-delà de la production de fèves, le gouvernement...
New research published in the Journal of Experimental Botany reveals that wheat crops are more sensitive to grain yield losses from heat waves that occur before reaching their flowering stage than those occurring later. However, exposure to heat waves early in the growing season may reduce yield losses during additional heat waves through a protective "priming" effect.
Growing leys—grass and clover—is nothing new in Swedish agriculture. But in the arable farming regions dominated by cereal production, leys are less common. One reason is that there needs to be a market for what is harvested.
Les banques de semences sont censées préserver une partie de notre patrimoine agricole pendant des décennies, voire bien davantage. Mais combien de temps ces graines peuvent-elles réellement rester capables de germer ? Une vaste analyse menée en Australie apporte une réponse moins rassurante...
Billions of people still suffer from hunger and food insecurity worldwide. Meanwhile, microbial contamination causes a third of global food waste annually, resulting in major economic losses and illnesses. Although antibiotics and pesticides help control contamination, their excessive use can promote bacterial resistance or leave toxic residues.
One alternative uses materials that generate highly reactive forms of oxygen when exposed to light, called photocatalysts, to prolong food freshness. These molecules kill bacteria by damaging their cell components in a process called photodynamic inactivation or PDI. However, current PDI systems rely on energy-intensive lasers and long exposure times because the bacteria’s protective cell membranes block reactive oxygen molecules. As a result, the systems don’t kill bacteria effectively and risk overheating food, affecting its freshness and nutritional value.
Scientists at Zhejiang University in China thought that it would be possible to achieve a PDI system using accessible, free sunlight with the right photocatalyst. Moreover, they also wanted to integrate this photocatalyst into food packaging to combat microbes during storage.
To make the photocatalyst, the researchers mixed water with a glue-like plant fiber that provides structural support, called pectin, and a chemical from plant seeds that supplies phosphorus, called phytic acid. Then they heated the mixture in a sealed reactor at 220ºC (428ºF) for 5 hours to form tiny structures composed of a carbon core surrounded by a phosphorus-rich shell called phosphorus-modified carbonized polymer dots or PCDs.
To incorporate the PCDs into film packaging, the researchers dissolved equal amounts of a plant fiber from konjac, called glucomannan,and another plant-derived molecule, called carboxymethylcellulose, in warm water to form a network of entangled molecular chains. Then, they added 1.5 milligrams of PCD per milliliter to this mixture, which linked the chains together like molecular fasteners. Finally, they added a moisture-binding chemical called glycerin to prevent brittleness. The researchers cast this mixture onto separate Petri dishes and dried them, forming thin, plastic-like PCD films.
To test the films, the researchers placed Escherichia coli bacteria between 2 sterilized film sheets and exposed the samples to either darkness or simulated sunlight for 20 minutes. They then transferred the microbes onto agar plates and incubated them for 15 hours, allowing surviving bacteria to form visible colonies. They compared the number of bacterial colonies with those of untreated samples to calculate the percentage of bacteria the films eliminated in each environment.
Tests under darkness showed that the films eliminated about 60% of the bacteria. The researchers attributed this result to the positive electrical charge of PCDs, which attracts the bacteria’s negatively charged cell surfaces. The electrical attraction stresses their cell membranes, interfering with essential life processes. This result suggested that the films use a separate charge-based antibacterial mechanism apart from PDI, which requires light to work.
Under simulated sunlight, the films eliminated nearly 100% of the bacteria. The researchers identified 2 principal mechanisms causing this. First, the PCDs acted as tiny heaters that generated localized heat, which stretched holes in the bacterial membranes, allowing contents to leak out of their cells through a process called photoporation. Second, the PCDs generated reactive oxygen molecules that could then penetrate the bacteria. Once inside the cells, these molecules irreversibly damage the bacteria’s internal components and genetic material through PDI.
The researchers also investigated whether PCD films could serve as food packaging by using them to wrap fresh strawberries. Compared with conventional nonbiodegradable polyethylene packaging where visible rotting occurred, the PCD films kept the strawberries fresh for more than 4 days by suppressing bacterial growth and regulating moisture levels. When the team tested whether the films were toxic, they found that the films are safe for humans and compatible for food applications. They also buried the films in soil for 24 days and found that they degraded by 78%, demonstrating biodegradability suitable for packaging fresh foods.
The team concluded that PCD films could be a biodegradable food packaging that combines plant-based materials with multiple antibacterial strategies. The films retained antibacterial activity in darkness and became more effective under sunlight through the combined effects of photoporation and PDI. These findings demonstrated that by combining multiple mechanisms into a single material, researchers can create multifunctional food packaging that remains effective across different storage conditions.
Electric farm tractors are a great idea that hasn’t quite found a way to succeed in the market, but Ohio-based GoSun thinks the time is right to try again – this time with integrated solar charging technology that could give its all-electric tractor a serious advantage over the diesel-powered competition.
Scientists in Brazil have demonstrated that a combination of three non-destructive imaging techniques, visible-spectrum (RGB) photography, X-ray radiography, and three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), can detect and characterize hidden damage in soybean seeds that conventional quality tests frequently miss. The study, published in Smart Agricultural Technology, comes at a critical moment: Brazil is the world’s largest soybean producer and exporter, with an estimated harvest of 166 million tons for the 2024/2025 growing season, and seed quality is increasingly under threat from the very climate extremes that help drive the country’s agricultural productivity.
The research, led by Rafael Mateus Alves and colleagues at institutions including the Seed Technology Center of Embrapa Soybean and the University of São Paulo, was funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Its central premise is deceptively simple: because seed quality is largely determined in the field, before harvest even begins, researchers and seed companies need tools that can look inside a seed without killing it. Destructive assays such as the tetrazolium viability test, which stains metabolically active tissue red, are the industry standard, but they end the life of the sample. That is a particular problem for breeding programs, where each seed represents a unique genetic combination that must survive analysis if it is to be planted.
The seed itself is a small miracle of engineering. A protective coat, derived from the ovule integuments and marked by a scar called the hilum, regulates water uptake and shields the embryo within. The embryo contains the plumule, which gives rise to the plant’s first true leaves; the apical meristem, precursor of the aerial plant; and the hypocotyl–radicle axis, which breaks through the soil and forms the primary root. Flanking this axis are the cotyledons, storage organs packed with macromolecules that are metabolized and shipped to the growing axis during germination. Damage to any of these structures, from insects, fungi, drought, heat, or rough handling during harvest, can silently reduce a seed lot’s vigor, the capacity for rapid, uniform germination that underpins successful crop establishment.
To interrogate this architecture non-invasively, the team assembled ten representative seeds from production fields, commercial lots, and storage samples, each embodying a distinct damage category: stink bug injury, purple seed stain caused by fungi, green seeds from incomplete maturation, wrinkled seeds from heat and drought stress, weathering-related coat ruptures, severe structural failure, mechanical harvest damage, and internal galleries bored by the cigarette beetle (Lasioderma serricorne) during storage. Every seed was imaged sequentially with each of the three modalities and then subjected to the tetrazolium test as a qualitative reference standard.
The technical pipeline was meticulously standardized. For visible-light imaging, seeds were mounted on acetate sheets and photographed with a Leica DMLB microscope equipped with a DFC 310FX digital camera, oriented in four standardized positions with the hilum consistently to the right. X-ray radiographs were acquired on a Faxitron MX-20 DC-12 system operating at 34 kilovolts, with a nine-second exposure and an object-to-source distance of 11.4 centimeters; uniform contrast settings were applied to all images to make damaged tissues directly comparable. The MRI work used a horizontal 2 Tesla superconducting magnet coupled to a Bruker Avance III spectrometer operating at 85.24 megahertz for proton nuclei. Before scanning, seeds were conditioned to raise their moisture content from roughly 8–10 percent (wet basis) by incubation on moistened germination paper for three hours at 25 °C, a step that ensured sufficient hydrogen signal for imaging. A three-dimensional FLASH pulse sequence, with a 3-millisecond echo time and 75-millisecond repetition time, collected data on a 128×128×128 matrix over a 12.8-millimeter field of view, yielding isotropic voxels of 100 micrometers per side. Datasets were zero-padded to 256³ before Fourier transformation and rendered in three dimensions using ImageJ with the 3Dscript plugin.
The resulting image galleries are striking. On seeds punctured by stink bugs, the dominant pest of Brazilian soybean fields, RGB images revealed darkened patches on the cotyledons and near the plumule, the visible legacy of insect feeding that lacerates tissue and injects yeasts that degrade it from within. X-ray images flagged zones of reduced radiation absorption in the same darkened regions, while MRI cross-sections exposed the depth of tissue destruction with unusual clarity, precisely because degraded tissue no longer absorbs water and therefore produces no magnetic resonance signal. The tetrazolium test confirmed that these zones lacked respiratory activity, meaning they were metabolically dead.
Not every symptom tells the same story, however, and the multimodal approach proved especially powerful at distinguishing superficial from structural damage. Seeds with purple seed stain, caused by Cercospora fungi that secrete the toxin cercosporin, showed internal structures that appeared entirely normal in both X-ray and MRI. Yet the tetrazolium test produced an unusually intense red coloration at the stained coat, indicating that fungal activity had compromised the seed coat’s ability to regulate water uptake, allowing the staining solution to penetrate more deeply into the embryo. Similarly, green seeds, which retain chlorophyll because heat and drought interrupted maturation, showed no structural anomalies under X-ray or MRI, but their membranes proved unusually permeable to the tetrazolium solution, hinting at the physiological deterioration typical of immature tissue.
Where MRI truly distinguished itself was in detecting damage invisible to every other method. One seed that appeared flawless in visible light and radiographically normal in X-ray images revealed, in its three-dimensional MRI reconstruction, internal ruptures running through the central cotyledons, the likely consequence of rapid, uneven drying that forces differential cellular expansion and eventual tissue collapse. In mechanically damaged seeds, the X-ray images showed a crack in the hypocotyl–radicle axis that the camera could not see, but MRI went further, revealing the full extent of the fissure and the displacement of the axis relative to the cotyledons. The team also documented a dramatic structural failure nicknamed the “popcorn effect,” in which alternating wetting and rapid drying cycles tear the seed coat and force the cotyledons apart, a phenomenon increasingly reported in Brazilian seed lots as late-season weather grows more erratic.
To move beyond qualitative observation, the researchers extracted grayscale histograms from each X-ray image, normalizing pixel frequencies across the full 0–255 intensity range. Two statistical descriptors, mean gray level and Shannon entropy, were then compared across damage categories using one-way ANOVA followed by Tukey’s honest significance test. The analysis yielded clear separation: undamaged seeds showed the narrowest distributions with peaks at high grayscale values, while beetle-infested seeds and wrinkled seeds displayed the broadest distributions with heavy weight in the lower gray ranges, reflecting hollowed-out tissues and sparse, deformed structures. Mean gray level differed significantly across categories, peaking in undamaged seeds and bottoming out in wrinkled ones, while Shannon entropy, a measure of histogram complexity, was highest in beetle-damaged seeds and lowest in healthy ones. Because each damage category produced a characteristic radiographic fingerprint, the authors suggest these histogram metrics could support automated, quantitative screening in commercial seed laboratories.
Each modality, the authors stress, occupies a distinct niche. RGB imaging is fast, cheap, and ideal for surface screening but blind to anything beneath the coat. X-ray radiography, already a mainstay of seed testing labs, reveals internal voids, malformations, and cavities rapidly and non-destructively, though it cannot report on metabolic viability and demands careful standardization. MRI, with its superb soft-tissue contrast and genuine three-dimensional resolution, excels at detecting subtle physiological and structural alterations, latent mechanical injury, hydration-induced ruptures, and moisture redistribution, but its cost and acquisition time currently confine it to research settings. The tetrazolium test remains valuable as a reference but is destructive and subject to interpreter bias.
The authors argue the techniques should be viewed as complementary rather than competing, and they sketch a future in which RGB and X-ray screening handle high-throughput commercial quality control while MRI resolves ambiguous or high-stakes cases, such as breeding lines and seed physiology studies. Advances in imaging hardware, automation, and artificial intelligence-based analysis, they note, could eventually fuse these modalities into scalable phenotyping workflows. For now, the message is clear: in an era when a single season of heat, drought, and hungry insects can undermine an entire seed lot, the ability to see damage in all three dimensions, without sacrificing the seed itself, may prove as transformative for agriculture as it has been for medicine.
Subject of Research: Non-destructive multimodal imaging (RGB, X-ray, and MRI) for detecting abiotic- and biotic-stress-induced damage in soybean seeds
Article Title: When damage goes deep: a multi-technique approach including 3D for soybean seed damage assessment
Article References: Alves, R. M., Teixeira, J. M., Marassi, A. G., Henning, F. A., Umburanas, R. C., Gomes-Junior, F. G., & Tannús, A. (2026). When damage goes deep: a multi-technique approach including 3D for soybean seed damage assessment. Smart Agricultural Technology, 15, Article 102523. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atech.2026.102523
Researchers in Brazil have demonstrated that a hybrid advanced oxidation process can transform pharmaceutical-laden wastewater into an effluent that is dramatically safer for plants, earthworms, onion root cells, and beneficial microorganisms, offering a rigorous ecotoxicological case for reusing treated sewage in agriculture. The study, published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research, addresses a long-standing blind spot in water treatment: proving that a chemically “clean” effluent is also biologically compatible.
Conventional wastewater treatment plants were never designed to strip out recalcitrant organic micropollutants such as pharmaceuticals, and trace amounts routinely slip through into receiving waters. Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) attack these stubborn compounds by generating highly reactive free radicals that fragment contaminant molecules. But chemical degradation alone does not guarantee safety. As contaminants break down, they spawn transformation products (TPs) that can, in some cases, be as toxic as—or more toxic than—the parent compounds. The research team, led by Lucas Gustavo da Costa and Alam Gustavo Trovó of the Federal University of Uberlândia, together with collaborators at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: does measurable chemical removal of micropollutants actually translate into reduced biological harm?
The centerpiece of their work is the H₂O₂/S₂O₈²⁻/UVC process, a hybrid system that combines hydrogen peroxide and persulfate with short-wave ultraviolet C radiation. UVC photons cleave both oxidants simultaneously, generating hydroxyl radicals (HO•) and sulfate radicals (SO₄•⁻) in the same reaction volume. This dual-radical strategy outperforms systems relying on either oxidant alone, or on peroxymonosulfate (HSO₅⁻), which is costlier and demands more energy for activation. The hybrid route also resists interference from inorganic species commonly found in real effluents, making it an economically attractive candidate for deployment at full-scale treatment plants. The process had already been chemically optimized in the team’s earlier work using multivariate mixture design and rotatable central composite design experiments; the new study is its first integrated biological stress test.
The experiments used real municipal effluent from a wastewater treatment plant in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, sampled after the plant’s final tertiary treatment stage of coagulation-flocculation with ferric chloride and flotation. The effluent was enriched with three pharmaceuticals representing different therapeutic classes: colchicine (COL, an antimitotic agent), nitazoxanide (NTZ, an antiparasitic), and sulfamethoxazole (SMX, a widely detected antibiotic), each at 325 nmol L⁻¹—equivalent to 130, 100, and 82 micrograms per liter, respectively. That concentration was deliberately chosen as high enough for direct HPLC–DAD analysis without preconcentration, yet low enough to be environmentally representative. Treatment was carried out in an amber glass reactor irradiated by two 8-watt UVC mercury lamps emitting at 254 nm, with a measured irradiance of 4.9 W m⁻². Residual oxidants were neutralized with sodium thiosulfate before any biological testing, ensuring that observed effects could not be attributed to leftover peroxide chemistry.
The ecotoxicological battery spanned multiple trophic levels and levels of biological organization. Oxidative stress was assessed in the earthworm Eisenia andrei by measuring malondialdehyde (MDA), a marker of lipid peroxidation, and protein carbonylation, an irreversible oxidative modification of proteins. Phytotoxicity was evaluated using lettuce (Lactuca sativa) seeds and a growth index combining germination rate and root elongation. Cytotoxicity and genotoxicity were quantified in onion (Allium cepa) root meristems through the mitotic index and the frequency of chromosomal and nuclear aberrations—micronuclei, chromosome breaks, stickiness, bridges, and nuclear buds—across 5,000 cells per sample. Finally, growth inhibition was tested in two environmentally relevant microbes: Azospirillum brasilense, a plant growth-promoting bacterium used in soybean cultivation, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast that persists in soils and fermentative niches.
The untreated enriched effluent told a worrying story. It exhibited substantial genotoxicity in onion cells—21%, approaching the 24% seen with the positive control, methyl methanesulfonate—and severe phytotoxicity, with lettuce growth indices far below the 80% threshold that signals absence of toxicity. Even the unspiked effluent itself suppressed lettuce growth, achieving a growth index of only 47%, evidence that bioactive compounds survive conventional treatment. In earthworms, individual aqueous solutions of NTZ and SMX raised MDA levels by 37.2% and 23.5% respectively, while the three-compound mixture increased lipid peroxidation by 38.0%, pointing to additive or synergistic oxidative stress mechanisms involving reactive oxygen species and Fenton-type chemistry within cells.
The picture changed decisively after oxidation. Following 10 minutes of UVC-driven treatment—the point at which 80% chemical degradation had been achieved, matching the minimum removal target proposed in the European Union’s COM(2022)541 directive—genotoxicity fell to 10%, and after 20 minutes, corresponding to the limit of quantification for the parent compounds, it dropped further to 6%, a statistically significant reduction. The plant growth index climbed above 80%, crossing from toxic territory into biocompatibility. The mitotic index in onion cells remained statistically indistinguishable from the deionized-water control (around 39–40% versus 40%), demonstrating that the process generated no cytotoxic byproducts capable of arresting cell division. And crucially for agricultural applications, neither the treated effluent nor its transformation products inhibited growth of A. brasilense or S. cerevisiae.
The mechanistic details are instructive. In the untreated enriched effluent, micronuclei—membrane-bound DNA fragments expelled from the nucleus during flawed cell division—were among the most frequent aberrations, indicating clastogenic and aneugenic damage. Colchicine exposure predictably produced C-metaphase accumulation, a signature of its tubulin-binding, spindle-disrupting mechanism first described in Allium nearly a century ago. SMX depressed the mitotic index and induced chromosomal damage, consistent with prior findings in Vicia faba. NTZ, whose genotoxicity had never before been reported, produced chromosome breaks, stickiness, and nuclear buds. After oxidation, the overall aberration burden fell sharply, particularly micronuclei and stickiness, although a few bridges and polyploid cells persisted even at 20 minutes—a reminder that some transformation products or resistant residuals may linger.
The microbial results came with a subtlety. Reduced A. brasilense growth after treatment initially looked like a red flag, but the team attributes it to depletion of assimilable organic matter, which serves as radical scavenger during oxidation and as a nutrient source afterward—not to toxicity. The negative control likewise grew slowly. This distinction matters because AOPs are designed to mineralize organic carbon, and a nutrient-poorer medium should not be misread as a more toxic one. For S. cerevisiae, no inhibition occurred at any stage of treatment, although NTZ alone significantly depressed yeast optical density, reinforcing the compound’s cell-cycle interference potential even at nanomolar-scale exposures.
The study’s broader significance lies in its methodological stance. By adopting an “effect-driven approach,” the team evaluated the toxicity of whole reaction mixtures without needing to isolate and identify individual transformation products—an impractical task given that many degradation byproducts are not commercially available. Their findings align with a growing consensus that treatment efficacy must be judged not merely by parent-compound removal but by the nature and reactivity of the resulting transformation products. Biochemical biomarkers such as MDA and protein carbonylation detected sublethal disturbances that mortality-based endpoints would have missed entirely, providing early warnings of cellular distress at environmentally relevant concentrations.
One caveat deserves attention: while lipid peroxidation declined after treatment, protein carbonylation rose slightly—1.05-fold above control—suggesting some transformation products may still provoke protein oxidation even as lipid damage subsides. The authors flag this discrepancy and call for future identification of the specific TPs responsible, alongside expanded organism panels, longer-term exposure studies, and pilot-scale validation across different environmental matrices.
The regulatory context sharpens the urgency. The EU’s proposed urban wastewater treatment directive mandates at least 80% removal of specified organic micropollutants and microbiological control for agricultural reuse, yet it conspicuously omits eco-compatibility assessment of the treated water itself. This study supplies exactly that missing dimension, showing that a process satisfying the chemical benchmark also delivers measurable biological benefit—lower genotoxicity, restored plant growth, intact cell division, and unharmed beneficial microbes. As water scarcity intensifies globally and reuse becomes less optional, the Brazilian team’s integrated bioassay framework offers a template for ensuring that the water farmers irrigate with is not merely chemically compliant, but genuinely ecologically safe.
Subject of Research: Mitigation of micropollutant toxicity in treated wastewater using the H₂O₂/S₂O₈²⁻/UVC advanced oxidation process, assessed through integrated ecotoxicological bioassays for potential agricultural reuse.
Article Title: Mitigation of micropollutant toxicity in treated wastewater using the H2O2/S2O82−/UVC process: An ecotoxicological perspective for agricultural reuse
Article References: da Costa, L. G., dos Santos, G. M., Marson, E. O., de Lima, M. G. F., de Souza Bessa, M. A., Scarafiz, G., Junior, S. F. S., Saggioro, E. M., de Carvalho, S. R., de Siqueira Ferreira, A., Nilin, J., Neto, W. B., & Trovó, A. G. (2026). Mitigation of micropollutant toxicity in treated wastewater using the H2O2/S2O82−/UVC process: An ecotoxicological perspective for agricultural reuse. Environmental Science and Pollution Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-026-38218-5
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In 1948, Muriel Howorth was living a relatively ordinary life in the seaside town of Eastbourne on the south coast of England when she received a letter that would completely change the trajectory of her life.
From an early age, she had wanted to take part, or as she put it, “be of use” in international affairs. During World War II, she was employed by the Ministry of Information, the government office primarily responsible for wartime publicity and propaganda in the UK.
Howorth must have been talented at promotion and publicity, because the letter that arrived in 1948—“out of the blue,” according to her personal papers—inquired if she would like to apply her talents to making atomic energy seem more friendly.
She was well-educated, but not terribly knowledgeable about atomic science, so she borrowed a book by the radiochemist Frederick Soddy, who was born in Eastbourne, titled The Interpretation of Radium. Within a few chapters, she found herself a true believer in the promise of the atom. She would devote the rest of her life to sharing the wonders of atomic science with anyone who would listen.
Nuclear energy gets a rebrand after WWII
The United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, a key factor in the end of World War II. The scale of the destruction and the ongoing damage from nuclear fallout after these attacks was vast. Despite the devastation, when a Gallup poll was released in mid-August of 1945, 85 percent of Americans approved of the bombing.
The atom was more or less a mystery to the average American, and was seen both as something to be feared and a source of hope. The potential for nuclear energy seemed endless, and although the Soviet Union was America’s ally, establishing a lead over the Soviets in nuclear technology seemed prudent.
Around 1900 when this photo was taken, nearly all grapefruits were yellow. The popular Rio red grapefruit wasn’t developed until 1984 using atomic gardening. Image: Contributor / Getty Images / Rykoff Collection
Muriel Howorth’s pro-nuclear children’s book and atomic gardening
In the years after World War II, American and European scientists and heads of state agreed that there should be a focus on more productive and peaceful uses for atomic power. The letter that Howorth received in 1948 was part of this effort. She threw herself into projects that combined science education and entertainment.
Notable among these was an elaborately choreographed pantomime titled Isotopia: An Exposition on Atomic Structure. Howorth also self-published a children’s book featuring Daddy Proton, Mummy Neutron, and their electron children. Her greatest impact as an early science communicator, though, was her work in atomic gardening.
Irradiated peanuts and other miracles of atomic gardens
Applying radiation to agricultural plants was, in part, a response to wartime scarcity. Restricted rations had made people acutely aware of the possibility of food insecurity. Researchers hoped that exposure to gamma radiation might induce mutations that resulted in higher-yielding or disease-resistant crop varieties. Perhaps some of those crops might be more dense in nutrients, too.
As atomic ambassador, Howorth founded the Atomic Gardening Association and recruited hundreds of members—or, as she called them, “atomic mutation experimenters.” Soon, atomic gardening kits were available to the public. One could send away for packets of seeds from an irradiated plant. By planting these seeds and propagating multiple generations of the plants, home gardeners could test whether any useful-seeming mutations had arisen.
Howorth herself served a mutated variety of Carolina peanuts to some of her scientist friends in 1959. Their response was underwhelming, so she planted the rest of the peanuts in her garden, where they grew remarkably quickly and produced extremely large peanuts. She usually kept a handful of these extra-large peanuts tucked away in her handbag in case the opportunity arose to recruit a new member to the Atomic Gardening Association.
In the June 1961 issue of Popular Science, a story promotes buying “plant atomic energized flower and vegetable seeds” as an “amazing science buy.” Image: Popular Science, June 1961 issue
Howorth’s lasting legacy to citizen science
It’s tempting to view Howorth as a kooky eccentric. Contemporary newspaper reports of her various events and projects were certainly dismissive in tone. More accurately, she represents an early effort at addressing the gap between scientific research and public understanding.
The world was far less interconnected in her day, with no internet, no omnipresent news media, and no social media platforms. Not only that, but the idea of women as integral parts of scientific research was slow to catch on, despite pioneering work by scientists like Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin.
Today, the same gulf exists between what scientists publish in their fields and what the average person understands. The same challenge of translating scientific language for public consumption exists for science communicators, but the tools available to them have evolved beyond recognition. You can find videos and posts by scientists explaining everything from how blimps work to what various chemical reactions look like, or from how fossils form to why black holes are so dark.
If Howorth were around today, her atomic choreography might have gone viral. As it stands, she was a wonderful example of the love of sharing knowledge with the public, and of the excitement and joy that comes with learning new things about how our world works.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
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