“Cadmium (Cd) contamination poses a serious threat to global food safety. As a toxic and carcinogenic heavy metal, cadmium can accumulate in agricultural soils through industrialization and urbanization before entering the human food chain. Rice is especially vulnerable because it absorbs more cadmium than other major cereal crops, making it one of the largest dietary sources of cadmium exposure for nearly half the world's population…

Addressing this challenge, a research team led by Dr. Sheng Huang and Jian Feng Ma from the Institute of Plant Science and Resources, Okayama University, Japan, together with Jiayang Li's group from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, used precise base-editing technology to identify a beneficial point mutation in the rice metal transporter gene OsNramp5.

Through saturation mutagenesis targeting OsNramp5, the researchers screened hundreds of genome-edited rice lines to identify variants that accumulated less cadmium while maintaining normal manganese uptake and plant performance.”

From Phys.org.

“In a long-awaited step, the European Parliament yesterday passed a law that allows the expedited approval of many gene-edited crops without the rigorous review required for traditional transgenic varieties…

Scientists and seed companies hope the law will lead to faster adoption of crops with improved disease resistance, heat tolerance, and nutrition…

Under the rules, as finalized this week, approval will be faster for crops whose gene edit seems modest enough that it could have been made through conventional breeding—a simple base change in an existing gene, for example, rather than the addition a nonplant gene. Stricter oversight will remain for transgenic engineering or more substantial gene editing.”

From Science.

“Despite decades of mass drug administration campaigns, schistosomiasis remains one of the world’s most widespread neglected tropical diseases. Rice farmers and their families are particularly at risk, as the parasitic worms that cause the disease are spread by freshwater snails found in the standing water of rice fields.

New research published in Nature Sustainability has explored how rice-fish coculturing – an intervention technique that introduces fish into the rice fields – could help reduce disease incidence and poverty along the northern Senegal River basin, a hot spot for schistosomiasis.”

From StanfordPreport.

Summary: The dollar price of a traditional Fourth of July cookout has increased since 2016, but rising wages have more than offset those higher prices. As a result, Americans spend less time working to earn this year’s Independence Day meal than they did a decade ago. Measured in time rather than dollars, the data show that abundance has continued to grow as the population has increased.

Every year, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates the cost of a traditional Independence Day cookout. The basket includes summer cookout staples such as cheeseburgers, chicken breasts, pork chops, potato chips, pork and beans, fresh strawberries, homemade potato salad ingredients, fresh-squeezed lemonade ingredients, chocolate chip cookies, and ice cream.

Since 2016, the dollar cost of this basket has risen 30.3 percent, from $56.67 to $73.82. At first glance, that suggests celebrating the Fourth of July has become significantly more expensive.

But money prices tell only half of the story. The real question is not how many dollars the meal costs, but how much time people must work to earn those dollars. Since 2016, blue-collar worker hourly earnings increased 50.4 percent, from $21.48 to $32.31 per hour.

Because wages rose faster than prices, the time price of the cookout actually fell 13.4 percent—from 2.64 hours of work in 2016 to just 2.28 hours today, a savings of 21 minutes.

Another way to measure progress is to ask: How much more does the same hour of work buy? We call this the abundance multiplier. Compared with 2016, the same amount of work today buys 15.5 percent more.

America added 22 million people between 2016 and today, a population increase of 6.8 percent. Yet abundance didn’t merely keep pace with population—it grew 2.28 times as fast. Every 1 percent increase in people produced a 2.28 percent increase in cookout abundance. That’s the signature of superabundance: on average, every additional person contributes more than they consume. Even though there are 22 million more of us, we’ll actually spend 7.5 percent less time working as a country to pay for our celebration compared with 2016.

Americans may spend more dollars, but they spend less of their lives earning this year’s Independence Day feast.

Government money printing during the COVID-19 pandemic did cause a temporary spike, but we have returned to the long-term trend of decreasing time prices and increasing abundance.

This year saw a slight reversal. Compared with the record-low time price in 2025, food prices increased 4.1 percent while blue-collar hourly earnings rose 3.5 percent. As a result, the time price of the cookout edged up by just 0.5 percent—less than one minute of additional work. Even after that small increase, the Independence Day cookout remains substantially more affordable in time than it was a decade ago.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.