A milkman having his float inspected, circa 1935.   CREDIT: Photo by General Photographic Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 We have a tendency to romanticize the past. Think about the food your great grandparents (or even their parents) ate in childhood and you might imagine farm fresh produce, pure milled grains, and pristine meat and dairy. But if they were living in the United States during the mid-to-late 19th century, that vision of food utopia wasn’t likely reality.  Before 1906, there were no federal food safety regulations in the US. Local grocers were a wild west of unlabeled additives, untested chemicals, and inedible fillers. In the gap between the industrialization of the food system during the mid-1800’s and those first laws dictating what could be sold as food, working class Americans spent decades eating “mostly crap,” says Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer-Prize winning science journalist. In her 2019 book, The Poison Squad, Blum details the origin story of the landmark Food and Drug Act. As more folks left farm life behind and came to rely on manufactured food “an enormous amount of food fraud” emerged, Blum tells Popular Science. Nowadays, the overwhelming majority of people continue to purchase their food from grocery aisles, but the food we buy there is much less liable to make us sick. So, how did we get from that past to our current present? And, with regulatory agencies including the FDA facing enormous cuts, what might the future hold? Ground Shells, Brick Dust, and Bones European countries, including Britain, Germany, and France passed food safety regulations about 50 years before the US did. In classic American style, we eschewed top-down restrictions and allowed the free market, free rein. In lieu of federal regulation, there was a haphazard patchwork of state and local laws surrounding certain foods pre-1906. Massachusetts, for instance, passed “An Act Against Selling Unwholesome Provisions” in 1785. But unsafe practices consistently fell through the cracks and into consumers’ stomachs, says Blum. In some cases, food wasn’t food at all.  Pre-pasteurization, milk spoilage and bacterial growth was a major problem. Away from the farm, dairy had to travel farther and keep for longer if people in cities were going to buy it. So, the dairy section became a hotbed of questionable additives. Borax, which you may recognize as a general-purpose pesticide, was used as a milk and butter preservative. Formaldehyde (AKA embalming fluid) was also a common milk additive and antibacterial agent. In addition to preserving the milk, formaldehyde also reportedly had a slightly sweet flavor, which helped improve the taste of rot, Blum explains.  A cartoon titled ‘Poisoning by Food Adulteration’. In November 1858 a confectioner bought Plaster of Paris from a druggist to add to lozenges. Instead of Plaster of Paris, he was acidentaly sold arsenic and 20 people died out of the roughly 200 people poisoned. This case gave ammunition to those trying to get legislation against food adulteration through Parliament (Scholfield Act of 1859). Illustrated by John Leech (1817-1864) an English caricaturist and illustrator, and dated to the 19th century. Arsenic was also used to dye food. CREDIT: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. Universal History Archive In cheese, lead compounds were added to boost its  golden color. Plaster of Paris, gypsum, and other white, powdery fillers made their way into milk and flour for color and texture. Flour was often portioned out by the grocer in-store–with mixed results. “If you went to a very honest grocer, you might get real flour. If you didn’t you might get a mix,” she says.  Coffee and spices were particularly terrible offenders. Ground coffee was often about 80 to 90 percent adulterated in the mid-19th century, says Blum. It might be made up of ground bone, blackened with lead, or charred seeds and plant matter. Spices were frequently 100 percent adulterated. Or, in other words, entirely made up of something other than what they were sold as. Cinnamon was frequently brick dust. Ground pepper could have been ground shells or charred rope. “Probably a good half of these products had some adulteration, depending on what you were looking at and how much you were willing to pay,” she says. The wealthy were generally able to afford higher quality, authentic, uncontaminated products.  But for everyone else, the problem of food fraud was so prevalent that people developed a suspicion of ground coffee, Blum says. Consumers started opting for whole beans instead, wherever possible. Suddenly, there was a market for counterfeit whole coffee beans, made of pigeon beans and peas, or even wax and clay. “You can find flyers that went to grocers that said, ‘you can, multiply your profits with our super cheap dirt beans.’” In her research, Blum found a record of a congressional hearing, where a food manufacturer described producing and selling a “strawberry jam” that was entirely red dye, corn syrup, and grass seed. His defense for the practice: “we have to be competitive in the market and other people are doing it too,” paraphrases Blum.  As all of the above was going on, people had little idea what they were consuming. “There was no labeling,” she notes. Though there were many cases of people falling ill. In an Indiana orphanage, multiple children died from formaldehyde poisoning. In New York state, an estimated 8,000 infants died from adulterated “swill milk” in a single year.  Pushing for Purity Calls for change came from multiple fronts, including womens’ groups and the growing “pure food” movement of the late 1800s, says Blum. But one chemist and physician, Harvey Washington Wiley, proved particularly dedicated and ultimately influential.  Wiley began noting and publishing reports on food contaminants during his work at the USDA in the 1880s and ‘90s. His primary job was to develop alternatives to sugar cane, but he started studying and cataloging adulteration in butter, milk, and honey– and later spices and alcoholic beverages. That’s where much of our data on food adulteration at the time comes from, notes Blum. Soon, Wiley was releasing regular bulletins on food adulterants and advocating for national laws. Many of his early attempts ended in failure. Congressional representatives received a lot of money from the food industry, and weren’t receptive to Wiley’s science-backed pleas for labels, transparency, and contamination regulations, says Blum. “He keeps pushing for it. The industry keeps shooting it down, and the political dog fight continues,” she says. Hubert E Mills of the Department of Pasteurized Dairy Products and Dora Morris, technician for the Maryland and Virginia Milk Products Association, checking samples taken from a farm for purity. Circa 1955. CREDIT: Photo by Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images. Evans But then, Wiley shifted tactics. He began conducting a series of experiments that he called the “hygienic table trials” with a group of USDA employees, later dubbed “the poison squad.” All of the dozen or so participants willingly and knowingly signed up to receive three freshly prepared meals, seven days a week, for six months from the newly created USDA test kitchen. Yet, along with their nourishing meals, a subset of the participants were also fed additives commonly found in adulterated food. “You could never have gotten this sort of study approved today,” says Blum. “He poisoned his co-workers.”  The group worked their way through borax, boric acid, salicylic acid, benzoic acid, sulfur dioxide, formaldehyde, copper sulfate, and saltpeter– among other things. Unsurprisingly, the squad was frequently sick and the experiment garnered a ton of publicity. “If you go to newspapers of the time, every single one had a story–’Americans are eating poison,’” Blum says.  The fervor, paired with the public outcry in response to Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, about Chicago’s meatpacking plants, led politicians to change their tune. In 1906, Congress passed both the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Act (colloquially known as “Wiley’s Law”). Later, the Food and Drug Act would be replaced by the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics act of 1938, which has been extensively revised and updated since. From these laws, the modern USDA– responsible for regulating meat and poultry products– and FDA, responsible for all other foods and pharmaceuticals, emerged.  The Future of Food Since the start of federal food regulation, states have beefed up their policies and the food industry has adopted its own standards. Many companies have even signed on to efforts like the Global Food Safety Initiative, which involves third-party testing beyond what’s legally required. Plus, the mere existence of federal law means that people can sue when things go wrong. Litigation is a big driver of compliance and caution at the corporate level, says Blum.  Yet the FDA still plays a key role in oversight, research, and responding to emerging threats like bird flu in milk, says Brian Schaneberg, a chemist and director of the Institute for Food Safety and Health (IFSH) at Illinois Tech.At IFSH, academic researchers collaborate directly with industry and FDA scientists and the institute hosts multiple federal projects and labs. Research there includes work on improving infant formula safety, food contamination from packaging, pathogen prevention in food manufacturing and produce, investigating the causes of illness outbreaks, and Grade A milk validation. “We really touch a lot of areas,” Schaneberg tells Popular Science.  Recently, the Trump Administration slashed more than 3,500 FDA jobs, amid broader slap-dash federal cuts. Despite claims to the contrary, these layoffs included dozens of scientists who conduct quality control and proficiency testing on everything from infant formula to dairy products and pet foods. The cuts have temporarily left the Center for Processing Innovation at IFSH almost entirely unstaffed, Schaneberg notes. From 15 staff, they’re down to four. Other labs across the country were also impacted.   After public pushback, FDA leadership promised to reinstate scientists in key roles and re-open a handful of the shuttered labs last week. At Schaneberg’s institute, federal scientists have been told they’ll be reinstated. Though, he notes they haven’t received formal notices confirming their re-hiring. The long-term fate of FDA research and testing labs also remains uncertain as proposed major budget cuts and a massive reorganization looms. The currently proposed Trump Administration plan would shift most food testing to the states.   [ Related: How to properly wash fruits and vegetables. ] “I’m definitely concerned,” says Schaneberg. He doesn’t see any clear, immediate threat to consumers, but in the long-term– he is worried about the FDA’s ability to ensure food safety if the agency is equipped with fewer staff and resources. “I still think all the big companies are going to do the best thing they can because they don’t want to hurt their brands and they don’t want to impact people.” And many states might have the ability to fill gaps. Yet there’s always bad actors, new brands, new additives, and unknowns, he notes.  It may be much rarer than it once was, but the FDA still detects unsettling instances of food contamination. In 2023 and 2024, the agency investigated high lead and chromium levels in cinnamon applesauce pouches, marketed to children, notes Martin Bucknavage, a senior food safety extension specialist in the Department of Food Science at Penn State University. “There’s those types of things that pop up, and it’s like ‘who– who else is going to go through and do that?,’” he says. The FDA has expertise in the science and the supply chains that few other institutions do, Bucknavage says, along with the ability and authority to respond quickly. With rapid changes and reorganization on the horizon, it’s hard to predict what the effect will be, he adds. “I think immediate-term, our food supply is going to be safe,” Bucknavage says. After all, FDA inspections are far less frequent than companies’ own safety tests and measures. But without the final layer of oversight, it’s possible something could be lost down the line, he says. Blum, with all her knowledge of the treacherous food landscape of decades past, agrees. “I’m not sitting here saying catastrophe, because we don’t actually know,” she says. “But there’s nothing in what the [Trump Administration] is doing that you would look at and say, ‘oh this makes us safer.’”

The Science Life Animals Cool water could protect sea stars from a mysterious disease Fjord-dwelling sea stars seem to be resilient to a devastating wasting disease Marine ecologist Alyssa Gehman surveys sunflower sea stars in Burke Channel on the Central Coast of British Columbia. These sea stars seem to be more resilient to a deadly wasting disease than their counterparts in warmer waters. Bennett Whitnell/Hakai Institute By Siddhant Pusdekar 5 seconds ago A mysterious disease that has plagued sea stars for more than a decade may have met its match in the fjords of British Columbia. Sunflower sea stars discovered thriving in the frigid waters suggest that cooler temperatures provide protection from sea star wasting disease, or SSWD. The finding, reported in the April Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is a valuable clue about what causes SSWD in the first place, researchers say. Sea star wasting disease has stumped scientists since the first big outbreak emerged in 2013 off North America’s Pacific coast. “We initially thought it was a virus, but went back on that, because the data was either flawed or the results couldn’t be repeated,” says Ian Hewson, a marine ecologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the new study. His follow-up research into possible microbial or environmental causes has been inconclusive. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

Nature, Published online: 01 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01351-1The Natural History Museum’s new gallery, Fixing our Broken Planet, examines Earth’s changing ecosystems and how to protect them.

A recent update caused ChatGPT to turn into a sycophant, with the chatbot excessively complimenting and flattering its users with reassurances — even when they said they'd harmed animals or stopped taking their medication. OpenAI has now reversed the changes.

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Photo Credit: NASA Juno found mushball-forming storms on Jupiter, helping study exoplanet weather Highlights Jupiter's storms create ammonia-water mushballs the size of softballs Mushballs cause ammonia loss deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere Similar mushball activity may happen on other gas giants in the universe Advertisement Jupiter's weather just got even stranger. A new study published in the Journal Science Advances revealed that the gas giant's turbulent thunderstorms create massive, softball-sized hailstones called "mushballs," made of ammonia and water ice. These violent storms churn Jupiter's atmosphere so deeply that they may explain a long-standing mystery among the scientists: the missing ammonia in the planet's upper layers. For years, scientists were puzzled over why deep pockets of ammonia seemed absent across Jupiter's atmosphere.Mushballs Shake Up Old AssumptionsAs per a report by LiveScience, Scientists believed Jupiter's atmosphere was well mixed, much like a pot of boiling water. However, after analysing a massive 2017 storm captured by Juno, researchers found that even local storms can punch ammonia deep into the planet, shattering the old assumption. “The top of the atmosphere is actually a pretty poor representation of what the whole planet looks like,” explained study lead author Chris Moeckel from the University of California, Berkeley, told the publication. On April 15, 2025, as per EarthSky, his team's findings suggest that the atmosphere becomes well-mixed only much deeper down than previously thought.Ammonia as a Tracer Beneath the CloudsJupiter's thick cloud cover blocks direct observation, and ammonia acts as a critical tracer to understand the hidden activity beneath the clouds. Scientists theorised in 2020 that Jupiter's powerful storms lift ammonia-rich ice particles to high altitudes, where they combine with water ice to create a mushy, slushy hailstone. These mushballs then grow larger and heavier, cycling up and down in the atmosphere before plunging deep, carrying ammonia and water with them. This process leaves the upper atmosphere depleted, matching observations from Juno.Confirmation came during Juno's February 2017 flyby. While passing over a storm zone, the spacecraft detected an unexpected deep signal rich in ammonia and water beneath the storm clouds. Moeckel recalled spotting the discovery while casually running data on his laptop at a dentist's office, describing the moment he realised the mushball theory must be true.A Universal Phenomenon Beyond JupiterResearchers now believe that Jupiter might not be unique. Gas giants across the universe and even newly forming planets could experience similar mushball processes. “I won't be surprised if this is happening throughout the universe,” Moeckel told to LiveScience, suggesting that Jupiter's stormy secrets may echo far beyond our solar system. For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. Further reading: Jupiter, pace Exploration, Planetary Science, NASA Juno Mission Gadgets 360 Staff The resident bot. If you email me, a human will respond. More Related Stories

Anthropic just launched ‘Integrations’ for Claude that enables the AI to talk directly to your favourite daily work tools. In addition, the company has launched a beefed-up ‘Advanced Research’ feature for digging deeper than ever before. Starting with Integrations, the feature builds on a technical standard Anthropic released last year (the Model Context Protocol, or MCP), but makes it much easier to use. Before, setting this up was a bit technical and local. Now, developers can build secure bridges allowing Claude to connect safely with apps over the web or on your desktop. For end-users of Claude, this means you can now hook it up to a growing list of popular work software. Right out of the gate, they’ve included support for ten big names: Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence (hello, project managers and dev teams!), the automation powerhouse Zapier, Cloudflare, customer comms tool Intercom, plus Asana, Square, Sentry, PayPal, Linear, and Plaid. Stripe and GitLab are joining the party soon. So, what’s the big deal? The real advantage here is context. When Claude can see your project history in Jira, read your team’s knowledge base in Confluence, or check task updates in Asana, it stops guessing and starts understanding what you’re working on. “When you connect your tools to Claude, it gains deep context about your work—understanding project histories, task statuses, and organisational knowledge—and can take actions across every surface,” explains Anthropic. They add, “Claude becomes a more informed collaborator, helping you execute complex projects in one place with expert assistance at every step.” Let’s look at what this means in practice. Connect Zapier, and you suddenly give Claude the keys to thousands of apps linked by Zapier’s workflows. You could just ask Claude, conversationally, to trigger a complex sequence – maybe grab the latest sales numbers from HubSpot, check your calendar, and whip up some meeting notes, all without you lifting a finger in those apps. For teams using Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence, Claude could become a serious helper. Think drafting product specs, summarising long Confluence documents so you don’t have to wade through them, or even creating batches of linked Jira tickets at once. It might even spot potential roadblocks by analysing project data. And if you use Intercom for customer chats, this integration could be a game-changer. Intercom’s own AI assistant, Fin, can now work with Claude to do things like automatically create a bug report in Linear if a customer flags an issue. You could also ask Claude to sift through your Intercom chat history to spot patterns, help debug tricky problems, or summarise what customers are saying – making the whole journey from feedback to fix much smoother. Anthropic is also making it easier for developers to build even more of these connections. They reckon that using their tools (or platforms like Cloudflare that handle the tricky bits like security and setup), developers can whip up a custom Integration with Claude in about half an hour. This could mean connecting Claude to your company’s unique internal systems or specialised industry software. Alongside these new connections, Anthropic has given Claude’s Research feature a serious boost. It could already search the web and your Google Workspace files, but the new ‘Advanced Research’ mode is built for when you need to dig really deep. Flip the switch for this advanced mode, and Claude tackles big questions differently. Instead of just one big search, it intelligently breaks your request down into smaller chunks, investigates each part thoroughly – using the web, your Google Docs, and now tapping into any apps you’ve connected via Integrations – before pulling it all together into a detailed report. Now, this deeper digging takes a bit more time. While many reports might only take five to fifteen minutes, Anthropic says the really complex investigations could have Claude working away for up to 45 minutes. That might sound like a while, but compare it to the hours you might spend grinding through that research manually, and it starts to look pretty appealing. Importantly, you can trust the results. When Claude uses information from any source – whether it’s a website, an internal doc, a Jira ticket, or a Confluence page – it gives you clear links straight back to the original. No more wondering where the AI got its information from; you can check it yourself. These shiny new Integrations and the Advanced Research mode are rolling out now in beta for folks on Anthropic’s paid Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. If you’re on the Pro plan, don’t worry – access is coming your way soon. Also worth noting: the standard web search feature inside Claude is now available everywhere, for everyone on any paid Claude.ai plan (Pro and up). No more geographical restrictions on that front. Putting it all together, these updates and integrations show Anthropic is serious about making Claude genuinely useful in a professional context. By letting it plug directly into the tools we already use and giving it more powerful ways to analyse information, they’re pushing Claude towards being less of a novelty and more of an essential part of the modern toolkit. (Image credit: Anthropic) Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.