KUALA LUMPUR, June 3 — US singer song-writer Peabo Bryson, known for his duets on Disney hits such as Beauty and the Beast and A Whole New World, has died at the age of 75.
His family announced his death in a statement carried by Variety, noting that no cause was given but that he had suffered a stroke earlier on Sunday.
“With broken hearts and profound sadness, the family of two-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and balladeer, Peabo Bryson, announces his passing,” the statement said.
The family added that he “transitioned peacefully at 5pm ET on the evening of Tuesday, June 2 (6am today Malaysian time), 2026, surrounded by the love of his family and those closest to him.”
They said his voice “served as the soundtrack to some of life’s most cherished moments” for more than five decades and that his music offered “comfort and inspiration” across generations.
Bryson was best known for his smooth vocals and duet ballads, including his Oscar‑winning performances with Celine Dion and Regina Belle for Disney films Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.
He also recorded hits such as Tonight, I Celebrate My Love, You’re Looking Like Love to Me and As Long as There’s Christmas.
Born in South Carolina, Bryson began his career in the 1970s with Moses Dillard and the Tex‑Town Display before signing with Bang Records as a solo artist in 1976.
He later moved to Capitol Records and released a run of R&B hits including Feel the Fire, Reaching for the Sky, I’m So into You and Crosswinds.
Bryson scored his first Top 10 pop hit in 1984 with If Ever You’re in My Arms Again, followed by Show and Tell and Can You Stop the Rain.
He appeared on the soap opera One Life to Live in 1985 and recorded a version of its theme song that ran for seven years.
His duets with female vocalists became a defining part of his career, including collaborations with Roberta Flack, Angela Bofill and Regina Belle.
His family said celebration of life and memorial details will be announced later.
Lieutenant governor and attorney general advance but result signals decisive defeat for controversial Nancy Mace
Donald Trump-backed Pamela Evette, South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, and Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general, have advanced to a runoff in a competitive race to represent the Republican party in South Carolina’s gubernatorial election.
The winner of the Republican primary is favored to win the closely watched general election, given South Carolina’s conservative tilt, although Democrats are hoping to ride a wave of progressive enthusiasm to make political gains across the ticket.
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© Photograph: Meg Kinnard/AP
© Photograph: Meg Kinnard/AP
© Photograph: Meg Kinnard/AP
PARIS, June 12 — Pity the poor fly that lands on a Venus flytrap. When the insect touches hair-like structures on this remarkable carnivorous plant, its trap snaps shut, dooming the victim to be digested over several days in secreted enzymes. Scientists have now found the physical mechanism behind this snapping action.
Researchers said experiments showed that the Venus flytrap’s closure is initiated by a rapid softening of the cell walls in the outer layer of the plant’s trap, which is a highly modified leaf divided into two hinged lobes that resemble jaws with teeth.
For more than a century, the prevailing hypothesis had been that the trap’s closure was driven by a rapid redistribution of water within the leaf, with water moving between cells to swell one side of the leaf. The new research points to a different biological mechanism.
“One of the most iconic plants in the world can still surprise us. After more than a century of research, we are still discovering fundamentally new things about how the Venus flytrap works,” said physicist Yoël Forterre of the French research agency CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, senior author of the study published yesterday in the journal Science.
The Venus flytrap is a small carnivorous plant native to a limited region of North Carolina and South Carolina in the United States. Like many carnivorous plants, it grows in nutrient-poor environments and supplements its nutrition by capturing and digesting insects.
In experiments conducted in Marseille, the researchers used high-speed imaging, mechanical measurements by indentation of the plant’s outer layer and mechanical modelling. They also measured water transport within the plant tissue to rule out that as the mechanism at play.
“The plant uses specialised trigger hairs located on the inner surface of the trap. When an insect touches these hairs twice within a short period of time, the trap closes. Closure can occur in as little as one tenth of a second,” Forterre said.
“Our hypothesis is that the trap is already mechanically loaded before triggering, much like a spring. When the trap is stimulated, the cell walls of the outer epidermal layer rapidly soften by roughly 30 to 40 per cent, meaning that the cell wall becomes more flexible. This releases internal stresses stored in the tissue and causes the trap to bend and close. The softening develops within about one second,” Forterre said.
When the trap snaps shut, the insect is sealed inside for digestion.
“By directly measuring the mechanics of the living trap as it responds, we pinned down the internal ‘motor’ that drives the leaf across its instability threshold and sets off the snap-buckling that closes it,” said physicist and study lead author Jeongeun Ryu, who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS and Aix-Marseille University.
After the plant absorbs the nutrient-rich liquid produced by the digestive processes, the trap reopens, with the insect’s empty exoskeleton left behind.
“What I find remarkable is that evolution often does not invent entirely new mechanisms, but rather reuses and refines existing ones. Plants are known to modify the mechanical properties of their cell walls during growth, but the Venus flytrap appears to push this mechanism to an extreme, using it on a timescale of about one second,” Forterre said.
There are roughly 800 known species of carnivorous plants. They are not all closely related, indicating that flesh-eating evolved independently multiple times during plant evolution.
How the Venus flytrap snaps shut is a topic that has long interested scientists including Charles Darwin, the 19th century naturalist who advanced the theory of evolution by natural selection. The researchers see potential practical applications from their findings.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time such a rapid change in the mechanical properties of cell walls has been seen in a plant,” Ryu said.
“It settles a question that goes back to Darwin — what drives one of the fastest movements in the plant kingdom — and points to a new way for a living thing to move: not by pumping fluid or simply collapsing, but by actively tuning the stiffness of its own material. That principle could eventually inspire soft robots or smart materials, though that remains a longer-term prospect,” Ryu said. — Reuters
This story was produced by Grist and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
Will Runion’s 736-acre cattle and hay farm is tucked into a horseshoe bend of the Nolichucky River in northeast Tennessee. On the morning of Friday, September 27, 2024, he was in the middle of two big projects: building a riverfront campground on his land to bring in tourists and income, and cutting the last of the season’s hay. Hurricane Helene had been arcing up from Florida toward the Appalachian Mountains, carrying heavy rain, and the river was high. Even though the banks seemed to be holding, he decided to move some of his cows and equipment to higher ground.
But the river kept rising. At about 11 a.m., the brown water topped its banks. He and his fiancée, his son-in-law’s parents, and neighbors scrambled to salvage what farm equipment they could, but they were nearly trapped when the quickly expanding river flowed into a low-lying area behind where they were working, cutting them off from dry land.
By afternoon, the river had swollen to some 1,200 feet wide—nearly 10 times its usual size. It “looked just like a lake,” Runion said. Trees snapped in the swift current and neighbors’ barns, roofs, hay bales, and household debris swirled by. The water swallowed Runion’s hay equipment and sent the little white house he’d planned to use as the new campground’s office sailing across a field.
At around 8 p.m., the Nolichucky finally crested and started to recede. Runion found a third of his fields covered in debris, dead fish, and tomatoes from upstream vegetable growers. The flood had gouged two holes the size of football fields in his hay pastures, down to a depth of 12 feet. Other sections of the farm were buried in up to 8 feet of sand or silt.
Helene dropped up to 30 inches of rain on southern Appalachia, causing historic flooding and landslides in parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and Virginia—a largely rural region where agriculture is a vital economic driver and cultural cornerstone. The mountains make it hard to spread out here, so farms tend to be small, and many growers use flood-prone bottomland because it is flat and fertile. But floods of this magnitude hadn’t hit here in generations. In North Carolina alone, Helene caused an estimated $4.9 billion in damage to the state’s agriculture sector. In Tennessee, agricultural losses were estimated at $1.3 billion. Thousands of farmers lost crops, tools, machinery, barns, buildings, animals, and fences.
“When you see 4 feet of sandy soils on top of your topsoil, you know that’s going to be a challenge. That was overwhelming.”
More than a year later, growers are also contending with the loss of something more vital, and more difficult to replace: their soil.
Runion knew immediately that his livelihood was ravaged. Without good soil, a farmer can’t farm. “When you see 4 feet of sandy soils on top of your topsoil, you know that’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “That was overwhelming.”
He sent drone footage of the damage to Forbes Walker, an environmental soil specialist with University of Tennessee Extension. “How do you fix this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Walker recalled thinking when he got Runion’s email. “How do we fix this?”
Over millennia, floods helped build the fertile land that farmers depend on. But today, climate change is driving more powerful and unpredictable storms. One study found that rainfall associated with Helene was 10 percent heavier due to man-made climate change. Research by the U.S. National Science Foundation suggests that what scientists call “100-year storms” will become three times more likely, and 20 percent more severe, over the next 50 years. What’s more, there’s little solid information about what happens to soil during a flood, or what to do when a farm’s soil is eroded or covered with material from elsewhere—its nutrients washed away and microbial communities disrupted. It’s a blind spot that is becoming more of a liability as storms like Helene become more common.
“None of us had ever seen anything like this before or responded to an emergency like that,” said Stephanie Kulesza, a nutrient and soil scientist at North Carolina State University. “And so we weren’t really prepared for recommendations to provide to producers.”
Soil can take thousands of years to form. Rock is weathered and slowly dissolves into smaller and smaller pieces. As dead leaves, animals, trees, and other plants decompose, they add organic matter and nutrients to the rock. Microorganisms establish themselves in the mix, driving nutrient cycling, aiding with decomposition, and stimulating plant growth; then worms and bugs, like beetles and ants, burrow in the mixture, aerating it. For soils to work well for agriculture, they need the right structure—airy enough to allow water to enter and move through, but not too quickly or too slowly—and sufficient biological and chemical richness, including nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, to nourish crops.
Farmers use synthetic or natural fertilizers to ensure their soil has enough nutrients. They can also introduce practices like no-till—farming without plowing up the ground—to maintain the physical properties of their dirt. Topsoil, the rich, uppermost layer with the most available nutrients for crops, tends to make up less than a foot of the entire soil profile, but it’s crucial for agriculture.
Helene’s floodwaters either washed away significant topsoil or deposited new sediment on top of it on thousands of farms. Some, including one of Runion’s neighbors, saw their fields stripped down to bedrock, or river rock. Runion and others woke to pastures blanketed by feet of sand or stone.
When topsoil is washed away, the necessary nutrients for growing go with it. And when topsoil is covered with sand, farmers can’t get to it. Both scenarios can significantly alter the land’s usability. Topsoil can take decades or centuries to develop, and sand lacks both organic matter and the physical structure to hold water and nutrients. “These aren’t soils yet,” said Kulesza of what Helene left on Runion’s and other farmers’ land. “They are in their infancy now. The clock has been reset.”
Runion had cared for his soils, working to eliminate weeds, adding fertilizer to keep nutrient levels ideal, and lime to control pH. “They were our way of life,” Runion said. “They were our income.”
After the storm, from October to April, he removed debris, bulldozed sand off his fields to get closer to the topsoil, filled holes, and graded uneven land. Crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency removed and shredded downed trees. He applied for government relief and received close to $1 million in state and federal aid. Runion said he could have easily used all of that money replacing equipment and paying for cleanup labor, fertilizer, and fuel, but he’s trying to stretch the money as much as possible.
By June, it was time to mow the fields that hadn’t flooded. He managed to put up enough bales of hay to feed his herd of 125 cattle, but not enough to sell. In a normal year, hay sales made up about a third of the farm’s income. With months of work behind him and his flooded land still too sandy and generally depleted, he realized the recovery would be a slog.
Runion returned to work on the campground, which he hoped would diversify the family’s earnings. The longer-term plan included a music venue and some hiking trails, and to host weddings and corporate events. After the storm, finishing it took on new urgency. He chose a new spot, about 450 feet upland from the river, and began clearing enough land for 45 camping sites.
One environmental soil specialist described the academic literature on flood-damaged soils as “thin.”
Runion also prepared a parcel of land for Walker, the extension soil specialist, to run tests that could guide his recovery. Last November, soon after the one-year anniversary of Helene, Walker showed me around Runion’s farm.
Working with students, Walker established four experiments over about 300 test plots. He’s looking at how different soil amendments—hay, wood chips, poultry litter, and a charcoal called biochar, to help the soil hold water and fertilizer; and Triple 19, a common plant food with equal parts nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium—affect the growth of wheat and fescue grasses.
When I visited, some of the plots remained mostly bare while, in others, tufts of green had sprouted. “We actually got some stuff to grow,” Walker said.
He described the academic literature on flood-damaged soils as “thin.” While some research and case studies exist on how agricultural soil recovers after a flood, there are few systematic investigations like the one Walker is conducting—on what works, and what does not—particularly in Appalachia, where floods of this magnitude have been historically rare.
When so-called atmospheric rivers spawned devastating floods in the Pacific Northwest and southwestern British Columbia in 2021, Aimé Messiga, a Canadian soil research scientist at the Agassiz Research and Development Centre, found a similar “scarcity of data.” He conducted a detailed review of the existing research and concluded that there was limited long-term monitoring, little understanding of how floods affect nutrients and microorganism communities in the soil, and uncertainties about what the actual impacts of floods on agriculture and crops are. Complicating everything is the variability between different farms, soils, and crops.
“You need decades of accumulated data in order to be able to predict what will happen. We don’t have those data.”
“You need decades of accumulated data in order to be able to predict what will happen,” Messiga said. “We don’t have those data.”
Today, some researchers are attempting to replicate flood conditions in labs to better understand, but field work is rare, Messiga said. There’s little money for it—and in the U.S., the Trump administration has cut funding for climate-related research. In addition, “many among us still look at these events as random,” Messiga said. “They’re not random. They will keep occurring.”
Since 1980, 45 flooding events have caused damages over $1 billion each in the U.S., with more than half of those occurring in the past 15 years. In 2024, flooding in the upper Midwest drowned crops. Repeat events in central California damaged agricultural operations from winter 2022 to spring 2023. Flooding along the Mississippi River in 2019 reduced crop planting by millions of acres. There also have been numerous smaller or more localized floods. One study found nearly 75,000 flash floods in the contiguous U.S. from 1996 to 2017, with increasing frequency in the past 22 years. Flooding frequency and strength is predicted to rise in the years to come due to climate change—a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and leads to stronger rain events—and poor land-use management.
Scientists are also starting to study a new type of event, called “weather whiplash,” when sudden changes occur from one extreme to another, amplifying the effects of the disaster. In Texas in 2025, a flood came after prolonged drought, causing widespread destruction.
For farmers, the effects of flooding on soil may linger for years after the disaster. In 2011, the Missouri River flooded states in the Upper Midwest, including thousands of acres of farmland. Fields were swamped for months with up to 20 feet of water. When the water finally receded, those fields were covered with anywhere from 2 to 20 feet of sand; other fields had washed out holes up to 70 feet deep. It looked like the surface of the moon, said John Wilson, a now-retired educator and agricultural expert who served Burt County, Nebraska, which was particularly hard-hit. “It was just bare soil,” he said. “There was no crop residue whatsoever.”
Wilson led teams that sampled the soil and helped farmers build back. He found that levels of nitrogen and organic matter were low in flooded soils, and fertility suffered when farmers planted their crops. Over about five years, fertility generally improved, but not everywhere. “If you went out today and did a yield map, you could still tell exactly where the erosion was because those areas are not as productive,” Wilson said.
Yield is money for farmers, who already navigate thin margins and, often, years without any profit at all. North Carolina’s strategic plan for agriculture recently enumerated just how thin: Of the state’s “42,500 farms, only 8,000 produce annual gross sales that exceed $100,000 annually. The overwhelming majority … some 23,400, gross less than $10,000 in sales, with only around 40 percent of the farms in the state having a positive net income in 2022.”
As floods increasingly wreck farmland, more researchers are starting to focus on understanding the effects of the floods and how to address them. Most of that work is happening in Asia, Messiga said. But a study in coastal North Carolina, where hurricanes regularly land, found that after a storm there was less organic matter in the soil, including carbon, and a disruption of microbial activity and nutrient cycling. The ground also absorbed water less readily.
Coastal flooding is also driving saltwater into the soil of farmland, making it more saline and unable to sustain crops. A North Carolina State University team has been developing test kits for farmers to sample the salinity of their soils, as well as a set of recommendations for keeping their soil viable. Such local work is important because soils vary greatly from place to place, and findings are not often easily transferable.
For now, in the wake of Helene, farmers are relying largely on trial and error to build back what was lost. Nicole DelCogliano has been farming vegetables, flowers, and livestock with her husband on 50 acres on the South Toe River, near Asheville, North Carolina, for 25 years. Helene washed away her barn, tractor, and other infrastructure. Of her 6 acres of vegetable fields, one was covered with several feet of sand, another got a foot, and a third field suffered extensive erosion.
“Our entire operation was wiped out, essentially,” she said.
“It’s not something that can be fixed overnight. This is a long process.”
With the help of some friends with tractors, DelCogliano cleared her main field and spread compost and lime on everything. “There was a mix of guidance about what you should do, like should you disturb the soil, should you not?” she said. “At an instinctual level, we just felt like we got to get the soil covered, we got to get something in the ground.” They sowed rye, a dependable cool season grass, as a cover crop, to protect the soil from erosion and add nutrients.
Karen Blaedow, an agricultural educator in Henderson County, North Carolina, said farmers should expect to put in at least three years of cover cropping before they see results in their soil. “It’s not something that can be fixed overnight,” she said. “This is a long process.”
In the spring following the flood, DelCogliano spread various amendments on her least-damaged field, including compost, lime, biochar, and blood and bone meal, which provide nitrogen and phosphorus, respectively. After all that, she and her husband seeded crops.
Their new vegetables came in about two weeks later than normal, but the season was more productive than ever, even though they grew on just 4 instead of 6 acres—“which is pretty amazing,” she said. “When we first started harvesting crops [after Helene], we didn’t yet have power at the farm. I had to dig one of our sinks out of a bank and bleach it and clean it and drag it up to the new barn—that we barely got a roof on—to wash and pack for that first [farmers] market.”
She doesn’t really know what made the year so productive. They planted more intensively to account for the smaller acreage and were able to harness their years of expertise to restart their operation basically from scratch. She also attributes the relative health of her soil to years of organic practices. “We’re dirt farmers,” she said. “Our primary job is to tend the dirt. Because that’s the basis of everything.”
Some farmers who’ve seen good harvests may have gotten a little lucky. Rather than sand, floods dumped silt. Even Runion got silt deposits in one section of his farm. Unlike the sand, the silty layers carry nutrients and create a positive growing environment. “We have a producer we work with and he said it’s the most fertile soil that he’s had in decades,” said Emine Fidan, a biosystems engineering and soil science researcher at the University of Tennessee, who’s also working on Runion’s farm. “And he said it grew the sweetest corn he’s ever had. It was growing just beautifully.”
Runion didn’t plant anything until this past fall. He prepared about 65 acres of the 220 that were underwater. It was slow going; he used a disking machine to till his land but had to stop often to clear sticks and trash and to grade out low spots. He mixed in mulch and planted oats, wheat, and fescue. Walker drove me past one of the fields and it still looked sandy, the grasses just a pale green shadow on the tan land. Runion said the greenery was “struggling to have any vigor about it.” He won’t know for sure how well or poorly the grasses do until spring, their peak growing season.
He considered planting more acreage but decided to wait and see what he learned from Walker’s trials. “It’s a process, and the knowledge we’re gaining there will help on the whole rest of it, too,” Runion said.
This spring, Walker’s team will measure the biomass in each plot as well as the quality of the crop, including how much protein it has and its digestibility. They’ll also be evaluating the soil itself, including its ability to hold water, to determine if any of the treatments improved the structure of the sandy dirt.
One farmer thinks the hay he’ll get in the coming years will be lower-yielding, lower-quality, and will cost more to produce due to the extra prep time, new seeds, and fertilizers.
Preliminary results suggest that, in plots where they put down mulch, the grasses are growing better than in plots with other amendments. The woody debris is reducing erosion and seeds are germinating well and standing up in the rough matrix. Spreading this kind of mulch isn’t an obvious solution, Walker said: Wood chips are a carbon-rich material, but as they break down in the soil they consume nitrogen, which can lead to a deficiency for the crops. But this mulch had sat in piles and started to decompose before it was applied to Runion’s fields, which made it less likely to cause these problems.
Runion had asked FEMA to leave the piles of wood chips on his farm rather than remove them like they normally would. Walker is looking for solutions to the soil problem that not only work but are also accessible. Have a mountain of mulch? Put it to work. Have nearby chicken houses? Maybe their nitrogen-rich manure can help revive flooded fields. His hope is that his team’s research can provide some guidance to farmers who find themselves in similar situations in the future. “I think it will have broad implications for a number of different crops,” including vegetables, Walker said.
Meanwhile, Runion is coming to terms with his situation. He thinks the hay he’ll get in the coming years will be lower-yielding, lower-quality, and will cost more to produce due to the extra prep time, new seeds, and fertilizers. He used to sell a lot of square bales, which tend to contain high-quality grasses and fetch a higher price, but he doesn’t expect to be doing that for a while. He’d initially hoped to have his land back in shape in a year or two. “Now it’s a four- to five-year [plan], I think,” Runion said. “It has been frustrating, and exhausting, too.”
He’s still optimistic, though. On my visit, I watched him grade out the new campground in a large dump truck. Freshly exposed red soil lay open to the sky. He thinks he can get the campground open by late summer or early fall. Over time, he hopes, it will be a more lucrative, and more sustainable, source of income. “The farm is really beautiful,” Runion said. “It still has a lot to offer.”
—Irina Zhorov, Grist
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/hurricane-helene-ravaged-farmers-topsoil-theyre-still-fighting-to-build-it-back/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
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