Wednesday, July 22, 2026
URI gardens, and gardeners, offer sweet scents, too
Gardeners at URI suggest sweet-smelling plants to explore
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| WELCOME: URI green spaces are open to the public, including the Youngken Medicinal Garden; shown, students AJ Chatterton, Ash Lilly and Kate Guinto with coordinator Elizabeth Leibovitz. (URI Photo / K. Curry) |
While the public loved
Morticia, the University of Rhode Island’s recently-bloomed
corpse flower, its 1,200-acre Kingston Campus offers the public a wide
variety of sweet-smelling specimens to experience and enjoy.
Plant sciences major Daniel Meservey, who works in URI’s Horridge Conservatory, says the conservatory has a number of fragrant specimens in its collection.
In the Conservatory, Meservey recommends olfactory-minded visitors locate the Lady of the Night and Kahili ginger, which will bloom soon.
Meservey also recommends
visitors look for the dendrobium and coconut orchids, passion flower, camellia,
and Arabian jasmine for their compelling smells.
His colleague Allegra Halverson, with URI Farms, says the Department of Plant Sciences and Entomology enjoyed making a cool plant like the corpse flower accessible to the public and hopes it piques interest in more of the botanical collections at URI.
“We hope this is a great gateway for people who have never visited the plant collections on campus to come back and enjoy what we have to offer,” she said. Halverson recommends visitors return to URI to smell the orange jessamine in the Horridge Conservatory come winter and notes a few other fragrant faves on campus as well:
The Katsura tree smells like cotton candy in the fall when the leaves drop. These trees can be found in the Botanical Gardens, at the Tootell Aquatic Center’s entrance, at Independence Square and elsewhere.
The Japanese tree lilac features white flowers in summer and blooms in June.
Fragrant snowball viburnum can be found at the entrance to the rose garden in May and elsewhere on the Kingston Campus. This is an example of a white flower that has a strong smell—an adaptation for attracting night foraging pollinators like moths and bats. The white flowers are also more visible at night.
Spicebush lives up to its name. Lindera benzoin smells like lemon fresh if you scratch the twigs and features small yellow flowers in spring; there are many along the Upper College Road edge of the Botanical Gardens. This native species is also great for birds with red fruits in the fall.
Common diet tips about water intake and spicy foods could be wrong
Real scientists are open to the possibility they could be wrong
By Laura Reiley, Cornell University
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| Credit: Laila Milevski/Cornell University |
The common rationale for drinking water at meals is that it physically stretches the stomach, triggering fullness so you don't eat too much. But a new Cornell study found no support for that idea in practice. The paper is published in the journal Appetite.
Instead, for every additional 100 grams of water participants drank, they ate about 39 more grams of food—roughly 49 more calories. People who frequently switched back and forth between bites of food and sips of water ate even more: Each additional switch was tied to about 4.4 more grams of food consumed.
Researchers suspect this "switching" effect works
by delaying something called sensory-specific satiety—the way a food's appeal
naturally fades the longer you eat it. Alternating with water may reintroduce
contrast that keeps the meal appealing longer, delaying the point at which
people stop eating.
"There's been this widespread advice that if we drink water, it fills us up," said Paige Cunningham, assistant professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences in the College of Human Ecology. "But water empties quickly from the stomach, so it likely doesn't fill us up for long. Instead, water may increase how much we eat, providing lubrication that can speed up eating and preventing dry mouth, which can prolong enjoyment of the food."
Charlestown Residents United (CRU) announces its 2026 endorsements
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Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Sociopathic Trump Delivers Absurd—and Terrifying—Address to the Nation
Trump's latest efforts to end democracy
Robert Reich for Inequality Media
We’ve been here before, but this time he’s even less restrained than he was in 2020 and is surrounded by people who will do his bidding.
His address to the nation was absurd. It was riddled with so
many lies that I’m reluctant to dignify them with rebuttals, but you should
have them.
He mentioned a newly-declassified investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Michigan that apparently had invited fraudulent registrations in 2020—but Trump didn’t mention that the applications had been caught and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly.
The FBI closed the
investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal
violation or a priority threat to national security.”
He alleged, once again, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig either the 2020 election. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years.
Nothing
suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, US intelligence assessment says
China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on
US voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence US policy
“as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”
The most significant foreign influence operations occurred
in the 2016 presidential election and were conducted by Russia, in favor of
Trump, according to the Mueller report. To
the extent that this and other reports appeared to cast doubt on the legitimacy
of Trump’s victory, they have had the effect of fueling his distrust of US
intelligence agencies.
Despite his repeated assertions that US elections are not
secure, Trump during his second term has significantly cut the budget of the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency, including its election work. That’s because Trump grew contemptuous of
the agency, and the government’s election security work generally, after it
validated the integrity of the 2020 election.
So the entire performance was fake—an extension of his
Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
Why you let down your guard on ads when scrolling on social media
Don't click "BUY" until the following day
Matthew Pittman, University of Tennessee
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| Even a few seconds of scrolling will tire your brain and make you more open to bold advertising claims. Money Knack on Unsplash, CC BY |
Honestly, I couldn’t remember. Maybe it was for a social media skit? Maybe I was planning on making her laugh? Or maybe I was just a “victim” of an online ad that showed me the wrong message at the right time.
Scroll on social media for even 30 seconds, and your brain is already a little more tired than it was before. And in that mentally foggy state, you become more open to ads that just tell you what to buy – “The facts make it clear, we’re the best!” – than to ads that invite you to draw your own conclusion.
I’m a professor of advertising who has spent years studying how social media affects consumer behavior. And my recent research underscores how the mental tax of processing information, or “cognitive load,” changes the way people respond to product claims from brands.
Tiny plastics in drinking water may be making dangerous bacteria stronger
Can plastics make you sicker?
Virginia Tech
In a study published in Water Research, Virginia
Tech researcher Jingqiu Liao and an international team found that nanoplastics
can interact with environmental microbes in ways that may create indirect risks
to human health, especially through drinking water systems.
"It is very important to better understand the adverse
effects of the nanoplastics on human health, and not just in humans but also in
the environment, which indirectly influences human health," said Liao,
assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. "The
nanoplastics can make the antimicrobial-resistant pathogens better survive,
which could be harmful to the environment and would have public health
implications."
Nanoplastics May Complicate Water Treatment
The researchers reported that bacteria exposed to
nanoplastics can become more resistant to disinfectants. That could create
serious problems for water treatment facilities and distribution networks
designed to keep drinking water safe.
"When the nanoplastics interact with the biofilm and
the bacteria inside them, they can strengthen the biofilm and make it more
resistant to any kind of measures that are going to keep the water clean,"
said Liao, who is also an affiliate with Fralin Life Sciences Institute's
Global Change Center.
Jingqiu Liao is an assistant professor of civil and
environmental engineering. Photo by Peter Means for Virginia Tech.
Nanoplastics are a smaller category of microplastics. They
range from about one to 1,000 nanometers in size and cannot be seen with the
naked eye. In this study, the researchers examined how these particles affect
the formation of biofilms inside drinking water systems.
The Richest 10% Cause up to $5.7 Trillion in Environmental Damage Each Year
Anyone surprised?
By University of Oxford
According to a new study, the highest-consuming 10% of
people generate an estimated $1.7 trillion to $5.7 trillion in environmental
harm each year, several times more, at the central and upper estimates, than
current international commitments for climate action and biodiversity
conservation combined.
Published in Communications Sustainability, the analysis places a monetary value on damage across four major planetary boundaries: climate change, biodiversity loss, nutrient pollution, and freshwater use.
The findings offer a stark measure of how heavily environmental
pressures are concentrated among the world’s most resource-intensive consumers.
Monday, July 20, 2026
Trump's renewed Greenland threats are why we have no allies
And our former friends won't trust us again anytime soon.
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| An image Trump posted on Truth Social depicts America taking over Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and Venezuela. (TS screencap) |
Nothing, though, has really changed.
Nearly five months out from Trump’s unprovoked and disastrous attack, the bottom line is that he’s lost the war but still can’t bring himself to admit it. So we’re trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of vacillating between belligerence and fake peace deals while gas prices spike, bombs fall, and people die.
Off to the side of that debacle, Trump last week reiterated
that he wants to seize Greenland in his sweaty short-fingered appendages.
Trump’s gaseous blather about invading Greenland seems like
a minor monstrosity compared to his actual murderous bombing
of, and ongoing humiliation by, Iran. But they’re part of the same phenomenon —
a foreign policy driven by ego, ignorance, and inflamed colonial malice, in
which the US sees no allies and really no other sentient human beings, just
territory to be won and glorious carnage to commit.
The renewed threats against Greenland are serious because
they signal once again how untrustworthy, erratic, selfish, and cruel US
foreign policy has become. Neither allies, rivals, nor enemies can trust us.
Which means everyone, definitely including us, is poorer, less secure, and less
safe.
How to avoid tick bites in your yard or while hiking in the woods, and what to do if one starts feasting on you
Tick bites are not good for you
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| Ticks can be tiny. An adult deer tick is on the left and a nymph of the same species is on the right, both sitting on an adult’s finger. CDC |
Each year, deer ticks alone cause an estimated 476,000 new U.S. cases of Lyme disease, which can do long-term damage to a person’s joints, heart and nervous system. You may be hearing about the lone star tick, as well – it can trigger Alpha Gal syndrome, which can leave infected people allergic to red meat and its byproducts, including certain vaccines, medications and products with gelatin.
Several other tick-borne illnesses, including Heartland virus disease, Powassan virus disease, babesiosis and anaplasmosis, can cause serious health problems and, in severe cases, even death.
2026 has been a tough year, with emergency room visits linked to tick bites running high going into summer.
So how can you avoid getting bitten, and what preventive measures actually work? I’m the co-director of the Tick-Borne Disease Center at Binghamton University. Here are some of the questions my team hears – and some advice:
1. Why should I worry about ticks, and how do I know if I’ve been infected?
Ticks can really pack a punch when it comes to how sick they make you. Lyme disease and anaplasmosis, both caused by bacteria that deer ticks can carry, are the most common tick-borne diseases we see in the U.S.
About 70% to 80% of people with Lyme disease will see a rash develop that often looks like a bull’s-eye, and they’ll experience flu-like symptoms, such as a fever, chills, body aches and fatigue. Antibiotics can control the infection, but only if the disease is quickly treated.
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