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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
During WWII, Great Britain poisoned sheep with anthrax on an idyllic Scottish island
When the U.S. almost nuked Alaska—on purpose
During WWII, a dress-wearing squirrel sold war bonds alongside FDR
During WWII, the U.S. government censored the weather
After WWII, flying saucer-shaped houses almost filled American suburbs
The CIA once trained cats to be Cold War spies
The post The British author who harvested mutant, jumbo peanuts from her atomic garden appeared first on Popular Science.
A biodegradable wash may help remove surface pesticide residues and keep fruit fresh longer, though more testing is needed before real-world use. Many shoppers follow the same pattern after buying produce: they bring fruits and vegetables home, wash them, dry them, and hope they stay good long enough to eat. Fresh produce, however, can deteriorate [...]The story of a Medieval European plague is coming into focus through historic manuscripts, but not in the way you might think. Instead of providing mere historical accounts, the animal skins from which these Medieval volumes are constructed provide genetic evidence for reconstructing the 3,500-year story of the sheepox virus (SPPV), which decimated European livestock.
In a recent paper published in Science Advances, an international team of interdisciplinary researchers ranging from geneticists and virologists to historians and conservators explored the history of this pre-modern plague.
The new work combs through Medieval history to reveal the lineages of diseases plaguing modern herds, providing new insight into the viruses threatening modern animal agriculture.
Chosen for the work were some of the most important Medieval manuscripts that Europe has to offer, including the millennium-old York Gospels, one of the best surviving examples of an early Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript. Another work used in the study was one of the earliest known English dictionaries, the Corpus Glossary of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Beyond these notable examples, the team exploited a variety of English and continental European works.
Medieval volumes did not contain paper pages like modern books, but instead, vellum pages made of calfskin, as well as the skins of goats and sheep. Therefore, these works are preserved as hundreds-of-years-old biological specimens for modern geneticists.
SPPV tends to target younger animals, such as the calves from whom vellum is made, and is highly contagious, rapidly spreading through large portions of a herd. While these factors made the disease easier for modern researchers to study via vellum samples, it also made it devastating to wool, meat, and milk production.
“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said lead author Louis L’Hôte, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, Dublin.
“These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies – such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia,” L’Hôte added.
With the rapid spread of SPPV across herds, many manuscripts contained SPPV DNA on multiple pages within the same manuscript. Additionally, finding SPPV DNA on pages made from both calf and goat skin marks it as a rare example of cross-species infection.
“Parchment making has been considered a vanishing craft, but we are beginning to understand just how much of the past it has retained. This project shows that parchments not only preserve our cultural history for hundreds of years, but also the landscape of disease in our livestock in the medieval period,” said supervising author Dr Kevin G. Daly, Associate Professor at UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science.
“This kind of exciting, surprising discovery is only possible when researchers from a range of disciplines come together to share their expertise and data,” Day said, calling this “a generosity and trust that collaborative science depends on.”
The Medieval manuscripts combine with even older surviving biological records, such as teeth, to show the virus reaching back 3,700 years. Between the manuscripts and archaeological finds, the team identified 41 samples containing related viruses.
Along with the goatpox virus and the lumpy skin disease virus, SPPV belongs to a category called capripoxviruses. The new research allowed the team to compare the ancient and modern sequences to determine that the division between the various viruses in the group occurred between 3,700 and 11,500 years ago, around the time animal domestication took hold in Europe as sheep came off the steppe.
“Ancient genomes can help us understand how these pathogens affecting us today evolved. We find that, unlike the smallpox virus, the sheeppox virus genome was very stable over the last few millennia,” L’Hôte concluded. “This might mean that genetic changes before this point were very important to how the sheeppox virus evolved to infect its host, which may help us fight the pathogen in the future.”
The paper, “3,500 years of Sheeppox Virus Evolution Inferred from Archaeological and Codicological Genomes,” appeared in Science Advances on September 2, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25 countries around the world. The results of this unique experiment were reported in a new paper published in the journal Plants People Planet.
“Our results show that how soil is managed can significantly affect both soil life and soil quality,” said co-author Marcel van der Heijden, an agroecologist at the University of Zurich. “Healthy, biologically active soil is crucial for fertility, nutrient cycling and many other ecosystem services.”
Soil health is critical for agriculture and, by extension, food security, not to mention a healthy global ecosystem, but it has been declining worldwide, per the authors. One key indicator of soil health is decomposition rates of complex organic matter, breaking down stuff like leaves, wood, even cadavers into simpler organic and inorganic compounds, releasing C02 and nutrients in the process. There have been relatively few large-scale national decomposition studies involving different land use types, although smaller studies have shown that how humans use a site can significantly affect the soil's biological diversity.
© Nicolas Zonvi
Since the 1850s, plowing and clear-cutting in modern agriculture have increased how fast soil erodes in the Upper Mississippi River Valley. Across the globe, farming strips soil up to 100 times faster than natural processes. It also removes farmable land and clogs waterways, threatening long-term environmental sustainability. However, scientists in the past have struggled to separate the effects of land-use changes from the transition out of the last ice age over the past 20,000 years.
To determine whether current farming practices are sustainable, researchers from Minnesota recently measured the speed at which soil eroded during the ice age transition and compared it with modern agricultural erosion. They focused on the Trout Creek tributary of the Mississippi River. This tributary has 2 step-like formations, or terraces, on its bank that represent past floodplains before the river eroded to its current level.
The oldest, upper terrace is about 14 meters (50 feet) above the lower terrace, which is about 8 meters (26 feet) above the modern floodplain. Scientists studying nearby areas have suggested that the terraces contain sediment from the last ice age, 20,000 years ago, referred to as the Last Glacial Maximum, to today.
In the upper terrace, the researchers pushed an empty cylinder into the ground, like a straw into a layer cake, to collect a cylindrical sample of sediments about 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) wide and 6 meters (20 feet) deep, called a sediment core. They collected slices of this core from 2 meters (6 feet) and 6 meters (20 feet) to find the terrace’s age.
Some grains in the sediment trap electrons while buried and release them when exposed to light. So the team shone light on the sediment slices to stimulate these electrons and measure the intensity of light emitted, known as their optically stimulated luminescence. Brighter light emissions indicate the sediment is older and was buried for a longer period of time. Using this method, they confirmed that the deep sediment slice was 22,000 years old, and the shallow sediment slice was 20,000 years old, dating the terrace back to the Last Glacial Maximum.
Next, the team drilled into the upper terrace with an auger to collect 25-centimeter (10-inch) wide plastic tubes of sediment. They pulled 4 samples from 0 to 2 meters (0 to 6 feet), and 1 sample from 6 meters (20 feet) deep. They explained that minerals in the sediment called quartz produce the radioactive form of the element beryllium, known as 10Be, when exposed to the Sun, so low 10Be means the sediment was buried quickly and had little sun exposure. The team measured the concentration of 10Be in each sediment sample and used an online calculator to estimate how quickly it eroded. The researchers calculated that during the Last Glacial Maximum, 0.073 millimeters (0.003 inches) of surface sediment were removed per year.
The researchers collected similar samples from the lower terrace and used optically stimulated luminescence to determine that it was between 22,000 and 14,000 years old. This terrace was the floodplain during the transition out of the Last Glacial Maximum, or deglacial period, where temperatures warmed and permafrost retreated. They measured the concentration of 10Be in samples from this terrace and determined that 0.049 millimeters (0.002 inches) of surface sediment were removed per year.
Finally, the researchers measured 10Be in a sediment sample from the modern floodplain, deposited between 14,00 years ago and today. They found that the sediment had eroded 0.053 millimeters (0.002 inches) per year during that interval, at a rate slower than it had during the glacial period, but similar to the deglacial period.
The researchers compared their findings to the average soil loss caused by modern agriculture, as reported by 4 previous scientists studying the area. They saw that modern farming removes an average of 0.60 millimeters (0.02 inches) of soil per year, which is 8 to 12 times greater than all the natural erosion rates they calculated.
They concluded that the recent spike in soil loss from agriculture greatly exceeds that caused by the largest natural climate transition in recent Earth history. Human-driven erosion shows an upward “hockey stick” trend like the one seen in global temperatures, suggesting that similar trends could exist throughout Earth systems. The team concluded that modern agricultural practices aren’t currently sustainable. While measures like native plant reintroduction can help curb this trend, more research is required to determine how best to limit long-term erosion.
The post Is modern farming sustainable? appeared first on Sciworthy.
Hundreds of US government drones have switched from border surveillance to a different surveillance mission this summer—looking for signs of screwworm infestations in wild animals and livestock herds.
The flesh-eating New World Screwworm is the parasitic larva that emerges from eggs laid by flies in the open wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals and humans, with untreated cases potentially leading to severe injury or death. Since the first screwworm cases were detected in South Texas in June, the US Department of Agriculture and US Customs and Border Protection have been conducting “one of the most extensive animal-health surveillance operations in the country,” the USDA said on August 10 in social media posts on platforms like X and Facebook.
The effort involves at least 200 drones owned by the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. But the actual number in use "varies depending on availability and need," a USDA spokesperson told Ars.
© US Department of Agriculture
Whether you’re looking for medical advice or tips on industrial agriculture, one thing is abundantly clear: never trust an AI chatbot without first getting a second opinion, preferably from a human who has actual expertise in the topic.
That’s the takeaway from an incident in the small city of Chuzhou, China, after a large langue model dispensed some advice that led to the untimely death of 25 acres worth of produce.
According to the Taiwanese publication CTWANT, a 67-year-old farmer surnamed Wu decided to start consulting an AI chatbot for advice nearly a year ago. He was reportedly skeptical at first, though the farmer began to let his guard down after some early successes with the AI’s farming tips.
Since that time, Wu has come to rely on his LLM for everything from fertilizing guidance to scheduling various tasks around the farm. After months of fruitful consultations, he decided to follow his AI chatbot’s new pesticide plan to the letter, letting loose on some 25 acres of precious sesame seedlings, all without ever double-checking with an expert or outside documentation.
The plan generated for him was basically a Long Island ice tea of agro-chemicals: a mix of “high-efficiency flupyridine” and “flufenazate” for pesky weeds, with plenty of “thiamethoxam” and “emamectin benzoate” for bugs and other pests, CT reported.
Not even a day after treatment, Wu says his juvenile sesame crop began to wither and die.
Per a video interview later translated by Tom’s Hardware, the farmer offered some hard-earned advice to any other growers looking to use his concoction: “If you spray it, the next day the seedlings won’t survive.”
“Both the grass and the seedlings will die, and the seedlings will die even faster,” Wu lamented.
It’s just the latest case of an LLM cooking up some slop that lands a professional in hot water. If nothing else, Wu’s in good company: he joins a host of other dupes across the legal, medical, financial, education, and media industries who’ve likewise fallen prey to an AI chatbot’s inaccurate output.
More on farms: The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor
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Scientists in Arkansas have developed a machine-learning approach that can identify potentially disease-causing strains of a poultry bacterium by analyzing not only which genes are present, but also how those genes are arranged across the genome. The method focuses on the “genetic neighborhoods” surrounding genes, offering a new way to distinguish harmful strains of Enterococcus cecorum from closely related strains that do not cause disease.
E. cecorum is commonly found in poultry environments, and many of its strains are harmless. However, pathogenic strains can cause arthritis, bone infections and lameness, creating serious animal-welfare problems and economic losses for poultry producers. Because pathogenic and nonpathogenic strains can share many of the same genes, identifying the genetic features associated with disease has been challenging.
The research team, led by Aranyak Goswami of the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station’s Center for Agricultural Data Analytics, examined the organization of genes within genomic islands. These are segments of DNA that bacteria often acquire from other microorganisms through horizontal gene transfer. Genomic islands can carry genes involved in antibiotic resistance, bacterial survival, movement of DNA and virulence, making them important regions for understanding how pathogens emerge.
Rather than treating the bacterial genome as a simple list of genetic components, the researchers analyzed it as a structured map. They investigated which genes occurred near one another, the order in which they appeared and the way groups of neighboring genes formed recurring units known as genomic-island cassettes. This architecture provided information that could be missed when genes are examined individually.
“The machine-learning model recognizes patterns in gene order much like it recognizes patterns in language,” Goswami said. In the same way that a language model can learn that certain words frequently appear together, the computational system learned that particular combinations and arrangements of bacterial genes were associated with pathogenic strains. The approach therefore captures relationships among genes rather than relying only on the presence or absence of individual DNA sequences.
For the proof-of-concept study, the researchers analyzed the genomes of 145 E. cecorum strains isolated from poultry. The dataset included 95 nonpathogenic strains and 50 pathogenic strains capable of causing illness. The analysis found that disease-associated strains were more likely to contain genomic islands enriched in genes linked to antimicrobial resistance and the transfer of genetic material between bacteria.
Those findings do not mean that every bacterium carrying such genes will necessarily cause disease. Instead, the researchers describe the system as an exploratory classification and research tool. It identifies patterns that may help scientists investigate why some bacterial lineages become harmful, while also providing clues about how resistance and virulence traits move through bacterial populations.
Current monitoring methods for E. cecorum often depend on culturing the bacterium or screening for specific genes. Such techniques remain valuable, but they may overlook broader genomic relationships. The new pipeline could complement these approaches by evaluating the wider context in which genes occur. Additional testing with larger and more geographically diverse datasets will be necessary before the method can be used for routine flock surveillance or diagnostic decision-making.
The researchers believe the strategy could eventually be adapted to other bacterial species affecting animals, humans, wildlife and plants. Goswami’s team is beginning to examine Enterococcus faecalis, a close relative of E. cecorum and a frequent cause of hospital-acquired infections in humans. They also plan to apply the pipeline to Escherichia coli and other bacteria to study how nonpathogenic lineages acquire the genomic configurations associated with disease. The study, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, demonstrates how machine learning and comparative genomics can reveal hidden signals in bacterial DNA and may help researchers track the evolution of emerging pathogens.
Subject of Research: Animals
Article Title: Genomic-island cassette architecture provides interpretable signal for exploratory classification of poultry-associated Enterococcus cecorum lineages
News Publication Date: 7-Jul-2026
Web References: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2026.1882753
References: Frontiers in Microbiology, DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2026.1882753
Image Credits: UA University Relations photo by Chieko Hara
Keywords: artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computational biology, bacterial pathogens, Enterococcus cecorum, genomic islands, genomic architecture, antibiotic resistance, poultry disease, pathogen surveillance, comparative genomics
The global expansion of chicken farming has created conditions that allow Campylobacter to spread, mix and adapt more readily. Commercial poultry farms now hold billions of chickens, creating a vast habitat where bacteria can move, mix and adapt. An analysis from the Ineos Oxford Institute for Antimicrobial Research at the University of Oxford found that [...]
In the Bolivian Altiplano, fewer Aymara farmers are relying on local weather knowledge to schedule farming tasks, like choosing the best dates to plant crops and predicting a frost or drought. At the same time, there is growing doubt about whether these traditional indicators remain relevant today in the context of rapid social, economic, and climatic changes.
Farmers are struggling because the National Weather Service of Bolivia (SEHNAMI) fails to provide useful weather forecasts due to the geographical complexity of the Andes and a scarcity of weather stations. In addition, many farmers can’t access this information because SEHNAMI lacks local outreach programs to deliver reports directly to them. In a region with a weak technical forecasting system, local knowledge is a vital resource, but its use is declining.
Scientists in the past focused on preserving local weather knowledge or discussing how it might help communities adapt to climate change. However, very few researchers have scientifically validated local weather indicators, since doing so requires many years of historical meteorological data to establish statistical “skill” in local forecasting.
Faced with this gap, researchers in the US and Bolivia recently set out to validate indigenous indicators in 2 Bolivian municipalities: Umala in the Central Altiplano and Ancoraimes in the Northern Altiplano. To do this, they paired each traditional weather sign with a measurable variable, like temperature, that could approximate it. This approach allowed them to directly compare traditional observations with scientific data.
The researchers wanted to determine whether traditional weather knowledge is still accurate and relevant under current conditions, since validating these methods would strengthen local knowledge and benefit the schools and policies that promote it. To test this, the researchers worked with 6 Aymara communities. First, they conducted workshops with local leaders and experts to compile a set of weather-forecast indicators. Then, they surveyed 95 farmers to rank the reliability of these indicators.
Through discussions with these communities, the team identified 13 weather indicators in the Central region and 20 in the Northern region. These indicators included specific plants, animals, and physical factors like constellations or winds that the farmers used to decide when and where to plant crops, and to predict weather conditions for the next season. The researchers focused on 2 key indicators that the farmers ranked as most reliable: the presence or absence of moisture under rocks on the Fiesta de San Juan on June 24th, and the flowering patterns of specific plants, called Thola and Sank’ayu. The farmers used the San Juan indicator to predict whether the upcoming year would be rainy or dry, and the plants to determine the most favorable dates for planting to avoid agricultural risks like frosts.
Finally, the researchers compared forecasts based on these 2 signs with over 30 years of meteorological data from nearby weather stations. In both cases, they used the minimum daily temperature as the measurable way to represent these local signs scientifically. Their results showed that the minimum daily temperature on the Fiesta de San Juan could explain more than half (55.5%) of the changes in rainfall during the growing season. They also confirmed that severe frosts that “burned” Thola and Sank’ayuthe flowers were followed by periods without rain, validating the farmers’ strategy of delayed planting.
The researchers concluded that local weather indicators used by Aymara farmers are most reliable for seasonal planning, especially in predicting the start of the rainy season. They stated that this result helps legitimize traditional knowledge and empower the community. For example, these communities now hold regular meetings to discuss forecasts and share this information with their neighbors via WhatsApp groups.
However, the team acknowledged that local knowledge was limited to short-term forecasting, as it only provided warnings a few hours in advance. Farmers need alerts several days in advance to effectively reduce their vulnerability to events such as frosts or hail. For this reason, the researchers suggested that the next step will be to co-produce forecasts by combining meteorological science with traditional knowledge.
The post Testing local weather knowledge in the Bolivian Altiplano appeared first on Sciworthy.
A native Australian millet may carry the genetic fingerprints of thousands of years of Aboriginal harvesting, storage, and plant management. Seen from the air, Channel Country resembles a vibrant and vast tapestry, with a network of waterways crisscrossing the land. Spread across more than 280,000 square kilometers in outback Australia, it is one of the [...]When the United States ratified the 13th amendment in 1865, federal lawmakers very nearly outlawed slavery for good — but not entirely. Tucked within arguably the most important corner of the US constitution is a massive caveat: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” (emphasis added.)
In the 160-some years since that amendment, a quieter type of forced servitude has lived on in the US: prison labor. From the debt peonage of the post-Civil War reconstruction era to the privatized contracting of the 21st century, prison labor is a massive money maker, generating $11 billion worth of revenue in 2022 alone.
As horrifying a thought as it is, one of the companies still benefiting from the practice is in the news for another reason: spreading a gut-busting diarrhea parasite through mass-produced shredded lettuce in grocery stores and fast food outlets.
It turns out that Taylor Farms, the agricultural company widely believed to be behind the cyclospora outbreak currently raging throughout the US, is also heavily involved in modern-day forced labor.
In reporting from 2023 that was resurfaced this week on social media, the publication Prison Legal News revealed that Taylor Farms was contracting labor from the Arizona Department of Correction, Rehabilitation, and Reentry for the low, low price of just $4.75 an hour — far below the cost to pay a non-incarcerated worker the federal minimum wage. (And to be clear, that’s not the hourly wage paid to the inmate, which is capped at $1.50 in Arizona.)
Taylor Farms is just one firm involved in the practice in Arizona. Others include Hickman’s Egg Farms, NatureSweet, and Televerde, each of which contracted labor from Arizona DCRR’s for-profit arm, Arizona Correctional Industries. That company’s job is basically to churn out bulk goods for the state of Arizona, like license plates, though it also makes quite a bit of money selling the labor-hours of incarcerated people to private companies.
Worse yet, some of those incarcerated workers may have been here as non-citizens — meaning it would be illegal to employ them in the same low-wage jobs if they weren’t being held in detention. As Prison Legal noted at the time, at least 26 prisoners employed by these companies had been detained by ICE, meaning that outside of incarceration, hiring them would have been illegal. To put it bluntly: their status as prisoners was the only thing that made the arrangement legal.
In all, the DCRR told Prison Legal it had hired out 15,700 “Mexican nationals” between 2008 and 2023, though couldn’t say how many of those workers were undocumented immigrants.
As Ruben Reyes, director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association told the publication at the time: “I’m venturing a guess that a large majority of the people who are labeled a Mexican national by [DCRR] are unauthorized to work here.”
Put into context, the revelation is a horrifying twist in an already nauseating story of corporate greed and deregulation. Though the institution of slavery may have been formally abolished, its legacy lives on — fully embraced by the for-profit companies pumping our food supply full of parasites.
Taylor Farms didn’t respond to a request for comment.
More on incarceration: Prisoners Alarmed to Discover That a Startup Is Training an AI Based on Their Phone Calls
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We are seeking virtual panelists and/or external (email) reviewers for Accelerating Earth Solutions (ROSES A.13).
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Consumers and agricultural workers rejoice: the Trump administration has killed a key regulation meant to keep toxic human and industrial waste sludge from our food supply, because toxic sludge is apparently not a threat to public health.
On Monday, the Guardian reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is tossing out a major body of research that formed the basis for regulations which would have effectively limited the amount of sewage byproduct we’re allowed to spray into the environment.
The research, published not even two years ago, was conducted in order to study the consequences of toxic PFAS “forever chemical” compounds in treated sewer sludge — called “biosolids” in the wastewater treatment industry. The findings showed that any amount of PFAS above 1 part per billion in sewer sludge used as fertilizer represents an increased cancer risk for farmers, as well as consumers.
That’s a problem, because previous EPA tests have found PFAS levels as high as 9.4 parts per billion in sludge used for agricultural purposes.
The Trump administration, however, says that’s not a problem, because it’s not like we’re spraying biosolids on everything — and so what if a few farm workers get cancer? In a nine-page draft memorandum released by the agency’s Office of Water, the EPA justified the decision by blasting previous EPA research, saying that earlier study created a “misconception” that “all biosolids and sewage sludge use and disposal practices will negatively affect the public.”
“Currently data does not indicate that there are widespread impacts to the food supply from biosolids containing PFOA and PFOS at the national level, and the general public is not likely to be exposed to sewage sludge-impacted foods,” the new draft insists. “The EPA estimates that sewage sludge is applied to less than 1 percent of America’s farmland annually.”
As with any data coming out of the Trump administration, these factual claims should be taken with a hefty grain of salt. Even assuming that basic assertion is correct, it still leaves the farmers and agricultural workers laboring on that farmland exposed.
“It’s shocking for the EPA to take a scientific assessment and simply throw it out,” Laura Dumais, an attorney with the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility told the Guardian. “Basically, they’re saying: farmers’ lives don’t matter.”
It’s also a particularly grim decision in light of the cyclospora outbreak currently roiling the US. Though cyclospora is a parasite and not a type of PFAS, studies have identified agricultural biosolids as a potential source of the gut-busting organism in the food supply. (Also noteworthy is the fact that the company broadly suspected to be responsible for the outbreak, Taylor Farms, made a substantial donation to Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc just days after the FDA pushed back a major regulation on food traceability.)
And as the Trump administration strips regulations that would clamp down on sewer sludge contamination in industrial agriculture, it acknowledges that “approximately 20 percent of sewage sludge managed each year is sold directly to the public or applied to sites where the public might be exposed.”
Rather than continuing with regulations that would make the public safer, the new EPA memorandum advises Americans to “research the supplier of the sewage sludge” and avoid “application of sewage sludge in locations where children may have access to the soil.”
For public health advocates like Dumais, the move amounts to a complete dereliction of the EPA’s duty to the public.
She told the Guardian that “it’s shocking that the EPA is willing to throw all of these people under the bus and the EPA’s solution here is ‘do your own research — we’re not going to regulate anything, so if you think it’s dangerous then figure it out for yourself.'”
More on Trump: Trump Administration Scrapping Nuclear Energy Rules Requiring Plants to Keep Radiation Levels “As Low as Reasonably Achievable”
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