By Walt Hickey
Veggies
According to new data from Numerator, the reaction to the Cyclospora outbreak has included not just a pullback from the specifically affected iceberg lettuce but also a broader pullback from vegetables in general, with some $280 million in monthly consumer produce spending at risk. While 72 million households continued to buy salad mixes and kits over the month ending July 26, over 6.5 million households stopped buying altogether.
The Languid and the Lucid
A groundbreaking new analysis of the Fast and Furious franchise of films sought to find which screen presences were the least fast and the least furious. Researchers ascertained how much screen time a character had compared to how much of that screen time was spent driving or running (fast) or participating in fights or other moments of furious intensity. There is a winner, the paragon of The Languid and the Lucid: Monica Fuentes. The former U.S. Customs agent who appears in both 2 Fast 2 Furious and Fast Five had an impressive 1,807 seconds of screen time (roughly a half-hour!) over which she drives for zero seconds, runs for zero seconds and engages in no fights or even scuffles. Congratulations to Monica on a successful pacifist run of the Fast franchise.
Aldi
There is a supermarket price war brewing in the United States, as low-cost German supermarket Aldi is on pace to become the second-biggest supermarket chain in the country behind Walmart. Aldi had 2,626 stores in 2025, slightly behind the 2,689 Kroger locations and 3,556 Walmarts. With 3,200 locations planned by the end of 2028, Aldi intends to mount a serious challenge to Walmart, which has a 20.8 percent market share for U.S. sales of grocery, personal care, household supplies and baby goods. Additionally, Aldi needs only 10,000 to 20,000 square feet of retail footprint, considerably less than the 50,000 square feet of a typical supermarket and the 200,000 square feet of a Walmart Supercenter. Aldi’s German thrift makes it a unique competitor to Walmart, too: According to one analysis, Aldi was 12 percent cheaper on average than Walmart was.
Gamma Rays
Researchers have found a clever new way to predict tree mortality by analyzing weathered soils with gamma rays. Beginning in 2023, forests in Western Australia experienced droughts, and splotches of the forest died off in interesting patterns that claimed the lives of three percent of the forest’s trees. Researchers sought to find out why some patches died, and others did not, using airborne gamma ray spectrometry data to interpret the geology of an area based on the potassium-40 levels in soils. That isotope is linked to bedrock breaking down through weathering, and in areas with shallow bedrock, the levels are higher. Researchers found that the measurements of those gamma ray signals lined up directly with other measurements of soil depth and of tree death, indicating that potassium-40 could be used to find areas where the bedrock is relatively shallow in the Earth, and thus there isn’t a lot of soil to hold groundwater.
Antibodies
New research published by a science integrity researcher concludes that large numbers of validation images in the catalogs of companies that sell research antibodies may be doctored or fabricated, finding almost 19,000 images from 15 antibody companies with fabrications. Over 300 companies are in the space, selling between 3.5 million and 4.8 million types of research antibodies that track and tag proteins being studied. The poor performance of some of those antibodies has been a concern in scientific fields for some time. According to the researcher, there were 6,388 problematic images on G-Biosciences’ catalog, 5,580 on Thermo Fisher and 2,236 on Origene, some of which appeared to be produced in-house and others which came from third parties.
Snakebites
A new study raises the estimated number of annual snakebites and snakebite mortality, based on data from 79 countries from January 2007 to March 2025. Between 2.1 million and seven million people experience snake envenoming every year, according to the study, with the mortality of those bites coming in at 274,000 to 513,000 people per year. Sub-Saharan Africa was responsible for about 45 percent of those envenomings and bites.
Meteorites
The final moments of 75 meteorite falls had been captured on video and photographs, allowing researchers to figure out seven distinct phases of what is actually happening when these rocks “burn up in the atmosphere.” It turned out to be a slightly more intricate process than the simple evaporation of rock. First, a shock wave of air forms in front of the rock, and air molecules colliding with the rock begin to cause the air around it to glow. Next, the rock begins to spin rapidly, changing brightness as it spins, before turning into a fireball and then losing most of its mass due to melting. At 60 kilometers above Earth, phase four is a melting equilibrium where the brightness stays steady as the rock loses up to 40 percent of its mass. High pressure makes the rock break apart, then the back of the rock breaks apart with one last bright (often red) flare. Finally, in phase seven, the fragmentation continues until the remaining pieces slow down enough to stop glowing.
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Walt, think you’ve gotta include more info on why Aldi has grown so much — they bought the ugly remains of Winn-Dixie (BIG grocery chain throughout The South), and reworked most (all?) of those stores into Aldi-branded stores.
Aldi just ended up as the buyer; coulda been Walmart. Coulda been Amazon Fresh. I think Kroger bowed out because of some regulatory/union concerns in the Midwest.