Walmart teams up with Google to offer voice-activated grocery shopping

Walmart’s latest effort to one-up Amazon in the grocery sphere allows customers to order groceries using voice prompts through Google’s smart-home assistant. Amazon currently dominates the voice-activated grocery shopping market, having captured over 67 percent of market share in 2018. Read more at CNBC …

Is Poland Spring water really from a spring? ‘Not one drop,’ says a lawsuit

A recent class-action lawsuit “contends that Nestle Waters’s marketing and sales of what it advertises as ‘100% Natural Spring Water’ has been ‘a colossal fraud perpetrated against American consumers.’” The suit also claims that the brand’s namesake, the Poland Spring in Maine, ran dry almost 50 years ago. Nestle Waters has stated that it remains confident in the accuracy of the Polar Spring labels. Read more at The New York Times …

US disaster aid won’t cover crops drowned by Midwest floods

The USDA has no program in place to financially compensate farmers for stored crops that were damaged by recent Midwest floods. Only 390,000 acres of the 416,000 acres of flooded cropland will be eligible for the federal program that “helps farmers and ranchers remove debris left by natural disasters on farmlands.” Read more at Reuters …

Fish oil and vitamin D supplements might offer some health benefits

A recent study has found that vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acid supplements may help prevent heart attacks, strokes and cancer in people who have never had such problems before. Researchers gave participants 2,000 IU of vitamin D and 840 mg of omega-3s, which adds up to two servings of fish per week. Read more at Harvard Health Publishing …

Growing corn is a major contributor to air pollution, study finds

A new study published on Monday revealed that corn production is responsible for roughly a quarter of all premature deaths related to air pollution each year in the U.S. Ammonia from fertilizer application appears to be the biggest culprit—when plants are overwhelmed by nitrogen in fertilizers, the excess is released into the atmosphere as ammonia. Read more at NPR …