Mineral systems: Their advantages in terms of developing holistic genetic models and for target generation in global mineral exploration

Peer-Reviewed Publication

COMPUSCRIPT LTD

 

IMAGE: CONVERGENT MARGIN-OROGENIC GOLD MODEL SHOWING RANGE OF TECTONIC SETTINGS FOR OROGENIC GOLD SYSTEMS WITHIN A CONSISTENT GEODYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT. view more 

CREDIT: GEOGEO

Mineral systems: Their advantages in terms of developing holistic genetic models and for target generation in global mineral exploration

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geogeo.2021.09.001

Announcing a new publication for Geosystems and Geoenvironment journal. Geosystems and Geoenvironment is a quarterly international interdisciplinary journal in English that publishes high quality original research articles and timely reviews in interdisciplinary fields of Earth and Environment Sciences. Geosystems and Geoenvironment provides an integrated platform to publish breakthrough data and findings, as well as innovative concepts and models, related to the emergence and all related aspects of surface or deep Earth Systems and their planetary equivalents.

In this article researchers from the University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia; the China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China; University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia and Kochi University, Kochi, Japan discuss how mineral systems provide a logical and hierarchical mechanism to integrate information over a range of time and terrane scales using the broad critical components of Geodynamics (tectonic setting), Fertility (source of ore and hydrothermal fluid components), Architecture (fluid plumbing systems) and Preservation (degree of post-ore uplift and erosion).

The article demonstrates, that although their adoption in published economic geology literature appears limited, there is value in such mineral systems for single deposit classes, using orogenic gold as an example, and closely related deposit groups, using porphyry-high-sulfidation-skarn Cu-Au-Mo systems as an example. The value of grouping disparate deposit classes based on similarities of their Geodynamics and Preservation parameters is demonstrated by the siting of numerous, not normally grouped, deposit classes on the margins of cratons and blocks with thick mantle lithosphere. Consideration as mineral systems provides a useful way of “seeing the wood for the trees” and defining universally applicable genetic models for deposit classes. It also allows focus on the critical measurable parameters that aid exploration to the exclusion of small-scale information that may only be uniquely applicable to the specific deposit from which it was derived.

Article reference: David I. Groves, M. Santosh, Daniel Müller, Liang Zhang, Jun Deng, Li-Qiang Yang, Qing-Fei Wang, Mineral systems: Their advantages in terms of developing holistic genetic models and for target generation in global mineral exploration, Geosystems and Geoenvironment,

Volume 1, Issue 1, 2022, 100001, ISSN 2772-8838, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geogeo.2021.09.001.

 

Keywords: Mineral systems; Orogenic gold systems; Porphyry Cu-Au systems; Craton margins; Metallogenic factories

# # # # # #

Geosystems and Geoenvironment publishes four volumes every year [February, May, August, and November]. The article categories include high profile Review papers published together with author vitae and photographs, Research Papers, Letters, and Discussions. Additionally, selected colour figures of accepted papers will be printed free of cost in colour in the Journal, and the Journal provides gratis reprints and a complimentary journal copy. All articles in Geosystems and Geoenvironment will be free open access through Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform.

 

For more information, please visit https://www.journals.elsevier.com/geosystems-and-geoenvironment 

Editorial Board: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/geosystems-and-geoenvironment/editorial-board  

 

GeoGeo is available on Science Direct.

 

Submissions to GeoGeo may be made using Editorial Manager.

 

ISSN 2772-8838

 

CAPTION

Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) image of part of the Atacama Desert, Chile, acquired in 2000, showing the giant Escondida-Zaldivar porphyry Cu-Au cluster.

CREDIT

GeoGeo

 

CAPTION

Global map showing giant to world-class mineral deposits with indirect Geodynamics relationship to subduction sited on craton margins.

CREDIT

GeoGeo

Kudzu Roots and Soy Molasses may help treat three types of cancer especially kids'

Scientists have found anticancer substances in them

Peer-Reviewed Publication

URAL FEDERAL UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: SAIED ABUSHANAB NOTES THAT ISOFLAVONES INHIBIT TUMOR METASTASIS WITHOUT AFFECTING HEALTHY CELLS. view more 

CREDIT: ILYA SAFAROV / URFU

Soy molasses and kudzu roots contain isoflavonoids with high antioxidant and cytotoxic activity, scientists have discovered. Substances can help fight cancer, especially when chemotherapy or surgery to remove metastases can be dangerous. A description of the study was published in the journal Plants.

The isoflavonoids in soy molasses and kudzu roots are phytoestrogens that mimic the action of the human hormone estrogen. They help to bind and remove free radicals from the body, which cause cell damage and disrupt immune system functions. This, in turn, leads to various diseases, including the formation of cancerous tumors.

Isoflavones found in plants are effective against dense tumor structures affecting human internal organs. For example, soy extract is most effective against metastases and malignant tumor cells developing in the muscles (rhabdomyosarcoma), while isoflavones from kudzu roots showed good anticarcinogenic effect against brain cancer (glioblastoma multiforme) and bone and connective tissue cancer (osteosarcoma). Studies were performed in vitro on cell lines of these diseases.

“The cancers studied have a high degree of metastasis and are resistant to therapeutic regimens. They are especially dangerous for children: about 40% of cancers in children are from these types of cancer. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy help in only 50% of cases, in the other 50% the cancer cells continue to metastasize, and in children's bodies the cells grow faster than in adults. In addition, radiation therapy is very toxic, especially for children. Thus, there is a need to develop innovative strategies that can potentially inhibit the growth of tumor cells without side effects, so plant extracts are an alternative to traditional drug therapy,” said Saied Abushanab, a research engineer at the Laboratory of Organic Synthesis at UrFU.

Scientists determined that the most active isoflavones in both plant extracts were daidzein and genistein, which protect bone tissue. Puerarin, formononetin, and biochanin A were also found. Scientists used "green solvents" called natural deep eutectic solvents to extract isoflavones. The study used solutions of choline chloride and citric acid. It is organic compounds that are non-toxic to the body.

“This technology has shown to be more effective for isoflavonoid extraction than the synthetic method of obtaining them. It should be noted that choline chloride and citric acid also have their own therapeutic properties and thus can enhance the effect of isoflavones on cancer cells,” explains Saied Abushanab.

Phytoestrogens extracted from both plant preparations were identified using high-performance liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection, and their quantification was performed using an ultraviolet detector. The scientists note that the combination of these methods makes it possible to carry out both qualitative determination of the compounds in the extract and to determine the amount of these substances in the sample under study.

Note

Kudzu root or pueraria is an ivy-like liana-like plant in the legume family. It is native to Asia and grows from the tropical regions of Indochina to the temperate foothills of the Sikhote-Alin. Fresh root crops of the plant can be used in the form of medicinal drinks.

Soybean molasses is a waste product of the industrial production of soy protein concentrate as a source of sugar, fiber and protein. Currently, soy molasses is used as an ingredient in compound feeds, as a pelletizer added to soybean meal, and as a substrate for biotechnical production.

---

JOURNAL

Plants

DOI

10.3390/plants11060741 

ARTICLE TITLE

Antioxidant and Cytotoxic Activities of Kudzu Roots and Soy Molasses against Pediatric Tumors and Phytochemical Analysis of Isoflavones Using HPLC-DAD-ESI-HRMS

 

CAPTION

Soy molasses and kudzu roots contain isoflavonoids with high antioxidant and cytotoxic activity

CREDIT

Ilya Safarov / UrFU.

Integrated effort needed to mitigate fracking while protecting both humans and the environment

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YALE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

Efforts to mitigate the potentially harmful effects of fracking have traditionally been divided along two fronts – those that primarily focus on protecting the environment and wildlife, and those that focus on protecting humans and domestic animals.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In a March 30 commentary in Bioscience, a trio of public health experts, ecologists and environmental scientists urge adoption of a more holistic approach when evaluating the impact of unconventional gas and oil production operations such as fracking. They also lay out a framework for future transdisciplinary collaboration and integrated decision-making, which they say will lead to more just and comprehensive solutions that protect people, animals and the environment.

“Researchers and policymakers tend to focus on only one domain, when they really are interconnected,” said Nicole Deziel, Ph.D., the paper’s lead author and an associate professor of epidemiology (environmental health sciences), environment and chemical and environmental engineering at Yale University. “This paper provides strategies to promote approaching oil and gas extraction industries and their impacts in a more holistic, interdisciplinary way.”

Joining Deziel on the paper are Liba Pejchar, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at Colorado State University and the study’s senior author; and Bhavna Shamasunder, Ph.D., associate professor, chair of the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and co-chair of the Department of Public Health at Occidental College.

The interdisciplinary collaboration on the paper, entitled “Synergies and trade-offs in reducing impacts of unconventional oil and gas development on wildlife and human health,” came about during a workshop on the community impacts of oil and gas development that Deziel attended several years ago. She was fascinated by Pejchar’s and Shamasunder’s presentations and discussed the crossovers in their perspectives during a long bus ride to a fracking well pad. That impromptu interaction, Deziel said, highlights the value of conferences that include representatives of different disciplines, one of the paper’s recommendations.

Hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking, is a method for extracting gas and oil from shale rock. The process involves injecting water, sand and chemicals into bedrock at high pressure, which allows gas and oil to flow into a well and then be collected for market.

Used extensively in the U.S., fracking has led to heightened concerns about its impact on the environment and human health. The process creates vast amounts of wastewater, emits greenhouse gases such as methane, releases toxic air pollutants and generates noise. Studies have shown these gas and oil operations can lead to loss of animal and plant habitats, species decline, migratory disruptions and land degradation. They have also been associated with human health risks. Studies have reported associations between residential proximity to these operations and increased adverse pregnancy outcomes, cancer incidence, hospitalizations and asthma. Some fracking-related operations have been located near lower-resourced communities, worsening their cumulative burden of environmental and social injustices.

In their paper, the authors describe how past protection measures, however well-intended, have sometimes favored one interest (the environment and wildlife for instance) at the expense of another (humans and domestic animals) and vice versa. Deziel used setbacks and buffers as an example. Setbacks aim to protect human health by prohibiting gas and oil drilling within a certain distance of homes, schools and other community domains. However, this approach may encroach on animal habitats, shifting the threat from humans to animals and the natural world. Buffers are similarly implemented, but with a goal of protecting wildlife and sensitive environmental areas. In contrast, limiting drilling altogether would be protective of both people and animals.

“The solutions are not being addressed in an integrative way,” said Deziel, whose primary appointment is with the Yale School of Public Health. “It’s important to protect vulnerable human populations as we’re making solutions, and we should also be mindful of the impacts to the ecosystem and the ecological world for their own intrinsic value.”

The authors recommend scientists and practitioners take a more integrated approach that spans both public health and conservation interests and focuses more on regions and populations that are underrepresented, historically marginalized or poorly understood. They cite One Health initiatives as an example of how a wide range of collaborations can work. One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral and transdisciplinary concept that has been primarily applied to address infectious diseases and optimize human health outcomes while recognizing the interconnection among people, animals, plants and their shared environment.

Deziel said she hopes the paper – and its recommendations – will inspire future collaborations across the fields of ecology, social science and public health, and encourage more inclusive decision-making that includes input from people and organizations directly affected.
 

 

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JOURNAL

BioScience

DOI

10.1093/biosci/biac014 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Commentary/editorial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Synergies and trade-offs in reducing impacts of unconventional oil and gas development on wildlife and human health

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Mar-2022

Pinpointing the sound of failure

Researchers identify critical signature produced when rocks fail

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: SUPERVISED MACHINE LEARNING FOUND THAT NEGATIVE TURNING (BLACK POINTS) AND POSITIVE TURNING (WHITE POINTS) AMPLITUDE MEASUREMENTS ACROSS A NEUTRAL ZERO LINE (GREY POINTS) HAPPENED IN CONCERT WITH ROCK FRACTURE MOMENTS. view more 

CREDIT: RUI LIU, TEXAS A&M ENGINEERING

Finding the specific sound a rock makes when it cracks and breaks seems impossible when surrounded by other subsurface noises. But Texas A&M University researcher Dr. Siddharth Misra, the Ted H. Smith, Jr. ’75 and Max R. Vordenbaum ‘73 DVG Associate Professor in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, discovered a way to hear and validate that sound in a project funded by the Basic Energy Sciences program of the Department of Energy (DOE).

“The DOE calls sounds of specific events the ‘signs of signature,’” said Misra. “In this case, the signature identified the break or mechanical discontinuity of a rock in the earth’s subsurface, especially as the breaks continued to grow or propagate into fractures.”

Misra and his doctoral candidate Rui Liu published their preliminary findings in the May 2022 issue of the Systems and Signals Processing journal.

Why does Basic Energy Sciences want this signature identified? Sounds are often important clues to environmental and security changes. Threatening noises, such as underground explosions, are hard to mistake. But the small sounds of a high-rise building foundation cracking and failing are just as threatening. So, the fundamental sound of rock undergoing mechanical failure is a basic and critical clue worth finding.

“This research goes to the heart of identifying something specific within a massive data set,” said Misra. “An example is credit card transactions. You cannot monitor the whole data set for fraud because the transactions are so varied. You must find some indicative sign, such as a credit card charge in one city to book an airline flight immediately after that same card pays for an Uber in another city. That discrepancy is a signature.”

Previous attempts to pinpoint underground mechanical failures never brought reliable success, but Misra found that an unusual combination of three research methods — supervised machine learning, causal discovery and rapid simulations — could tackle the problem.

The supervised machine learning began with lab experiments in which a multipoint sensor system was placed on the surface of a rock and recorded sound wave-transmission measurements through the material as it cracked and finally failed. Computers monitored the information and were taught which data signatures meant initial, intermediate and end-stage damage. One tell-tale signature that repeatedly traveled up and down across the zero point between positive and negative measurements caught the computer’s attention, once it knew what to look for.

“I can only see the color or shape of something with my eyes,” said Liu. “But machine learning can pick out so many more characteristics from the data. It picked out those positive and negative turnings, and we used that sign to get further results.”

Misra and Liu searched for the causation of each of these turnings to confirm their source. They couldn’t rely on the computer to complete this step because machine learning is not the best interpreter.

“During the heat of the summer, ice cream sales increase and drowning deaths increase,” said Misra. “If you use machine learning or simple statistical methods, they might say people are drowning because people eat ice cream. That's a correlation. Though they are both related to the summer heat, they are not connected to each other. They each have a different cause. We are looking for causation for these turnings because that's when they become meaningful.”

Misra and Liu created a workflow that could generate scenarios of various fracture propagations and measured waveforms. Then, they increased the workflow’s speed to rapidly run up to 20,000 different simulations of possibilities for each event. This allowed the researchers to discover the best cause-and-effect explanations.

“We didn’t control how the discontinuity propagated, so there's a lot of randomness,” said Misra. “Yet, as the fractures grew, despite the differences in direction or length, results showed a similar increase in amplifications or positive and negative turnings across the zero point in the waveforms. So, this is a definite signature of rock failure, which, to the best of my knowledge, was not known prior to this research.”

While the signature discovery is exciting, the project still has several months to go. Misra intends to explore the limits of the data-driven simulations and causal discovery approach. He will also test other methods to see if similar or different results occur.

“What we need to do as scientists, as engineers, is to find causality, find causation,” said Misra. “We tried a lot of different techniques to discover this signature and its causal relationships. A lot of approaches didn't work, but one did. Now we need to find the limits of what it can do.”

---

DOI

10.1016/j.ymssp.2021.108791 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

News article

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Monitoring the propagation of mechanical discontinuity using data-driven causal discovery and supervised learning

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-May-2022

 

Planet-Scale MRI

• Press Release - Source: University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center
• Posted March 29, 2022 
  

Azimuthal anisotropy (black dashed lines showing the fast direction of wave speeds) in the mantle at 200 km depth plotted on top of vertically polarized shear wave speed perturbations (dVsv) after 20 iterations based on global azimuthally anisotropic adjoint tomography. The maximum peak-to-peak anisotropy is 2.3%. Red and blue colors denote the slow and fast shear wave speeds with respect to the mean model which are generally associated with hot and cold materials, respectively. CREDIT Ebru Bozdag, Colorado School of Mines

Earthquakes do more than buckle streets and topple buildings.

Seismic waves generated by earthquakes pass through the Earth, acting like a giant MRI machine and providing clues to what lies inside the planet.

Seismologists have developed methods to take wave signals from the networks of seismometers at the Earth's surface and reverse engineer features and characteristics of the medium they pass through, a process known as seismic tomography.

For decades, seismic tomography was based on ray theory, and seismic waves were treated like light rays. This served as a pretty good approximation and led to major discoveries about the Earth's interior. But to improve the resolution of current seismic tomographic models, seismologists need to take into account the full complexity of wave propagation using numerical simulations, known as full-waveform inversion, says Ebru Bozdag, assistant professor in the Geophysics Department at the Colorado School of Mines.

"We are at a stage where we need to avoid approximations and corrections in our imaging techniques to construct these models of the Earth's interior," she said.

Bozdag was the lead author of the first full-waveform inversion model, GLAD-M15 in 2016, based on full 3D wave simulations and 3D data sensitivities at the global scale. The model used the open-source 3D global wave propagation solver SPECFEM3D_GLOBE (freely available from Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics) and was created in collaboration with researchers from Princeton University, University of Marseille, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The work was lauded in the press. Its successor, GLAD-M25 (Lei et al. 2020), came out in 2020 and brought prominent features like subduction zones, mantle plumes, and hotspots into view for further discussions on mantle dynamics.

"We showed the feasibility of using full 3D wave simulations and data sensitivities to seismic parameters at the global scale in our 2016 and 2020 papers. Now, it's time to use better parameterization to describe the physics of the Earth's interior in the inverse problem," she said.

At the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting in December 2021, Bozdag, post-doctoral researcher Ridvan Örsvuran, PhD student Armando Espindola-Carmona and computational seismologist Daniel Peter from KAUST, and collaborators presented the results of their efforts to perform global full waveform inversion to model attenuation -- a measure of the loss of energy as seismic waves propagate within the Earth -- and azimuthal anisotropy - including the way wave speeds vary as a function of propagation direction azimuthally in addition to radial anisotropy taken into account in the first-generation GLAD models.

They uses data from 300 earthquakes to construct the new global full wave inversion models. "We update these Earth models such that the difference from observation and simulated data is minimized iteratively," she said. "And we seek to understand how our model parameters, elastic and anelastic, trade-off with each other, which is a challenging task."

The research is supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, and enabled by the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center -- the fastest as any university and the 13th fastest overall in the world -- as well as the Marconi100 system at Cineca, the largest Italian computing center.

"With access to Frontera, publicly available data from all around the world, and the power of our modeling tools, we've started approaching the continental-scale resolution in our global full wave inversion models," she said.

Bozdag hopes to provide better constraints on the origin of mantle plumes and the water content of the upper mantle. Furthermore, "to accurately locate earthquakes and other seismic sources, determine earthquake mechanisms and correlate them to plate tectonics better, you need to have high-resolution crustal and mantle models," she said.

FROM THE DEEPEST OCEANS TO OUTER SPACE

Bozdag's work isn't only relevant on Earth. She also shares her expertise in numerical simulations with the NASA's InSight mission as part of the science team to model the interior of Mars.

Preliminary details of the Martian crust, constrained by seismic data for the first time, were published in Science in September 2021. Bozdag, together with the InSight team, is continuing to analyze the marsquake data and resolve details of the planet's interior from the crust to the core with the help of 3D wave simulations performed on Frontera.

The Mars work put in perspective the dearth of data in some parts of the Earth, specifically beneath oceans. "We now have data from other planets, but it is still challenging to have high-resolution images beneath the oceans due to lack of instruments," Bozdag said.

To address that, she is working on integrating data from emerging instruments into her models as part of her NSF CAREER award, such as those from floating acoustic robots known as MERMAIDs (Mobile Earthquake Recording in Marine Areas by Independent Divers). These autonomous submarines can capture seismic activity within the ocean and rise to the surface to deliver that data to scientists.

SEISMIC COMMUNITY ACCESS

In September 2021, Bozdag was part of a team awarded a $3.2 million NSF award to create a computational platform for the seismology community, known as SCOPED (Seismic COmputational Platform for Empowering Discovery), in collaboration with Carl Tape (University of Alaska-Fairbanks), Marine Denolle (University of Washington), Felix Waldhauser (Columbia University), and Ian Wang (TACC).

"The SCOPED project will establish a computing platform, supported by Frontera, that delivers data, computation, and services to the seismological community to promote education, innovation, and discovery," said Wang, TACC research associate and co-principal investigator on the project. "TACC will be focusing on developing the core cyberinfrastructure that serves both compute- and data-intensive research, including seismic imaging, waveform modeling, ambient noise seismology, and precision seismic monitoring."

Another community-oriented project from Bozdag's group is PhD student Caio Ciardelli's recently released SphGLLTools: a visualization toolbox for large seismic model files. The toolbox based facilitates easy plotting and sharing of global adjoint tomography models with the community. The team described the toolbox in Computers & Geosciences in February 2022.

"We provide a full set of computational tools to visualize our global adjoint models," Bozdag said. "Someone can take our models based on HPC simulations and convert them into a format to make it possible to visualize them on personal computers and use collaborative notebooks to understand each step."

Said Robin Reichlin, Director of the Geophysics Program at NSF: "With new, improved full-waveform models; tools to lower the bar for community data access and analysis; and a supercomputing-powered platform to enable seismologists to discover the mysteries of the Earth's and other planetary deep interior, Bozdag is pushing the field into more precise, and open, territory."

More information

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Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics

Five out of eight finalists for a million-dollar sustainability prize floated algae as an alternative for plastic film.

BY SARA KILEY WATSON | PUBLISHED MAR 30, 2022


Making plastic alternatives from plants has a multitude of environmental benefits. Oleksandr Sushko on Unsplash

Plastic film can be a menace to the environment. The super-thin material that makes up baggies and shrink wrap has proven to be one of the trickier plastics to recycle—and often ends up festering in landfills or in the ocean. And when humans go through hundreds of billions of plastic bags each year globally, that can make for a gigantic problem. 

So, it calls for a equally gigantic solution. Just this week American fashion company Tom Ford announced the finalists for its $1.2 million Plastic Innovation Prize. Out of 64 applicants spanning six continents, eight were selected to material test their concepts for plastic alternatives. After a year, three winners will be chosen to share the prize and continue to develop their product, says Dune Ives, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Lonely Whale, which is co-leading the competition.

While the finalists wrapped everything from agricultural waste to peas into their approaches, they had one clear favorite when it came to a plastic substitute: More than half of them used algae in some shape or form in their designs. “Seaweed and kelp are called the lungs of the ocean,” says Ives. “Over the last several years we have seen more farming to help to solve nearshore coastal ecosystem issues, like warming, acidification, and deoxygenation.” Currently, seaweed is used in products like food additives, fertilizers, and supplements—but as abundance grows, so might innovative uses.

[Related: Adding enzymes to bioplastics can make them disappear]

Out of the eight finalists, five make bioplastic or plastic film alternatives out of seaweed, kelp, or another algae. Competitors from the UK included Kelpi, which makes compostable and low-carbon bioplastic packaging, and Notpla, which creates natural-membrane packaging that was used in water pouches for London Marathon runners in 2019. Zerocircle, based in Guragaon, India, turns local seaweed into dissolvable, ocean-safe packaging. Sway, based out of Berkeley, California, also works with seaweed for a home-compostable thin-film plastic alternative. Finally, Marea in Iceland uses local algae to design yet another biofilm alternative that fully degrades in the environment.

The journey from a slimy green plant to plastic-like material can be a stretch for the imagination. But it’s a shockingly simple concept, explains Mike Allen, lead scientist at Blue Microbe, a marine bioscience group based in the UK, and associate professor of single cell genomics at University of Exeter. Plastic manufacturing requires stringing “basic building blocks” of chemistry into different polymers. Those building blocks, Allen says, can come from most anything. In traditional plastics, they’re typically the result of crude oil that’s extracted from the ground, is refined into polymers, and formed into a clear, durable resin.

The same process applies to seaweed, Allen explains. (After all, fossil fuels are just squeezed remains of ancient flora and fauna.) The plant can be whittled down to its carbons and sugars, and then chemically shaped into building blocks. Once the bonds that hold the plant together are broken down, “you get similar biobricks, essentially,” Allen says. Those “biobricks” can then be used to make an entirely new product.

The cool thing about turning seaweed into industrial materials is there are assets in its natural qualities, too. Therefore, reengineering all the way to traditional plastics isn’t always necessary. “The really clever bioplastics, the biodegradable ones, are going less along that scale,” Allen says. “They aren’t breaking down as much, and are retaining some of their properties like hydrophobicity and permeability. Some of them are biologically active. They have sort of antimicrobial things like that, which are very different to traditional plastics.” Retaining some of these characteristics can help plastic alternatives break down faster, maintain edibility, and resist bacteria.


All five algae-based finalists in the competition are designed to decompose and biodegrade. Notpla, for example, breaks down in home compost in about 10 days. Meanwhile, Zerocircle’s founder and director Neha Jain says its alternative can break down in marine environments in a matter of hours, depending on the temperature of the water. Seaweed is also incredibly bountiful, appearing pretty much anywhere there’s a beach (sometimes it’s even labeled as a disastrous environmental nuisance). Not to mention, it grows plentifully without using agricultural lands—and the freshwater, pesticides, and fertilizers that farms depend so much on these days.

[Related: Old fish bones could make the eco-friendly plastic we’ve been waiting for]

“The only space left for growth is really the oceans,” says Allen. “But you’re not going to be growing trees or crops in the ocean, so your option is pretty much seaweed.”

Still, it will take many more steps beyond material testing to scale up seaweed-made bioplastics to bring to market. “​​Plastic-production technologies have gone through more than 70 years of improvement to reach the current output levels,” Zerocircle’s Jain says. “Achieving the same efficiency and production capacity from any alternative will take time and encouragement globally.”

Additionally, Allen emphasizes that swapping out one type of plastic for another won’t make the world any less dependent on disposables. The Plastic Innovation Prize finalists have a chance to address that as well.

“While we don’t wish to see seaweed-based packaging everywhere traditional plastic currently exists, we believe it’s the optimal solution for the many situations where thin-film packaging plays a vital and irreplaceable function,” says Sway co-founder and CEO Julia Marsh.

As the competitors dive into testing their plastic alternatives, they’ll be matched up with major apparel brands like J. Crew, Nike, and Tom Ford to test the products along working supply chains. The products will also be tested for marine animal and environmental safety by the Seattle Aquarium. Which bioplastic will come out on top, be it seaweed or otherwise, will be uncovered in just another year.

Editor’s Disclosure: Matt Sechrest—managing partner of North Equity, the lead investor in Popular Science’s parent company, Recurrent Ventures—is an advisor for the Tom Ford Prize. He was not involved in the assigning, writing, or editing of this story.

Sara Kiley Watson  is an Assistant Editor at Popular Science, where she has led sustainability coverage since 2021. She started her tenure at PopSci as an intern in 2017 before joining the team full time as an Editorial Assistant in 2019. Contact the author here.

The Science of Bad Vibes: Can Some Places Really Hold Onto Negative Energy?

Our physical surroundings—plus a few tricks of the human mind—could literally give us the heebie-jeebies.

BY STAV DIMITROPOULOS

MAR 30, 2022

PATRICK CHONDON / EYEEMGETTY IMAGES

Our habitat may not be as neutral as we perceive it to be.
According to one theory, some places hold onto leftover traces of emotions from people who previously lived there.

In another theory, spots like tunnels, sewers, or geological faults wreck Earth’s natural vibration—and maybe even your health.

Visitors to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland report feelings of tightness in their chests, nervousness in their hands, and feelings of depression—it’s almost like the place is haunted by tremendous amounts of bad energy. According to some scientists, there’s a high chance it’s one of many sites containing “negative energy.”

✅ Science helps us understand our world. Let’s demystify new findings together.

That means our habitat may not be as neutral as we perceive it to be, explaining the goosebumps and sick-to-your-stomach feeling you may experience in haunted houses or sites where horrific violence took place. There are three predominant theories for this phenomenon: the presence of emotional residue, or leftover evidence of past emotions that are still lurking around, “geopathic stress” emanating from Earth itself, and the power of our mind’s own expectations.

The Emotional Residue Theory

This is the house in Wentworth Falls where James Gardyne shot his wife Aldona in the chest and then drove away to kill himself, March 25, 1980.
FAIRFAX MEDIA ARCHIVESGETTY IMAGES

Emotions have the potential to “infect” or “brighten” their physical surroundings even after their source has physically moved to a new location, according to the emotional residue phenomenon. Though the theory likely originates from early beliefs in the contagious nature of magic, it has nevertheless become the focal point of several legitimate studies in the field of psychology.

A possible explanation is that the human nervous system is able to pick up on chemical signals the body gives off through sweat and tears. Studies have found, for instance, that men’s libido declines in the presence of women’s tears and that these “chemosignals” persist in the surrounding environment. Some experiments have attempted to describe human responses to them.

A Dutch study published in Psychological Science in 2012, for instance, found that chemosignals previously produced by men who felt fear or disgust “generated an interesting reaction” among women exposed to them. Scientists collected sweat from men while they attended either a fear-inducing or a disgust-inducing movie and exposesd women to it. The “fear sweat” sample produced fearful facial expressions while performing a visual task, while women who were exposed to chemosignals from the “disgust sweat” sample produced disgusted facial expressions during the same task.


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A second study by the same Dutch team, published in Psychological Science in 2015, found that exposure to body odor from people who reported feelings of happiness also produced feelings of happiness in the participants. Researchers recruited 12 men to provide the sweat samples for the study, who again watched a video clip intended to induce a particular emotional state: fear, happiness, and or neutral feelings.

Thirty-six women were exposed to the sweat samples. Facial expression data revealed that women who were exposed to “fear sweat” had greater activity in the medial frontalis muscle, which is responsible for elevating your eyebrows, a common feature in expressions of fear. Women who were exposed to “happy sweat” sported smiles. In its conclusion, the paper mentions a “behavioral synchronization” between the sweat donor and the sweat smeller. In other words, happiness could spread through chemosignals.

“I DEFINITELY BELIEVE THAT THERE IS STILL LOTS TO LEARN ABOUT HOW HUMANS ARE INFLUENCED BY OUR ENVIRONMENTS.”

Responding to emotional cues is common in the animal kingdom, too. “There are multiple studies of non-human animals showing that they respond to environmental cues we are not perceiving (at least not consciously), for example by increasing their levels of stress hormones before storms, or reacting to earthquakes or tidal waves,” Brian Hellmuth, professor of environmental science and public policy at Northeastern University in Boston, tells Popular Mechanics.

This may be an issue of sensitivity, or perhaps these animals have sensory abilities we lack, Hellmuth says. “While I don’t know of any Western science that demonstrates the influence of any ‘energy signature,’ I definitely believe that there is still lots to learn about how humans are influenced by our environments and especially the emotional, physical, and psychological impacts of environmental damage on humans.”

The Geopathic Stress Theory

Grotagja fault in Iceland.
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But maybe the environment doesn’t even need to be damaged to wreak havoc on humans. In 1929, German baron and medical researcher Gustav Freiherr von Pohl conducted a study in the Bavarian town of Vilsbiburg, concluding that certain geological faults (fractures between two pieces of rock) of “Earth-radiated energy” were linked with cancer. All the people who had died of cancer in Vilsbiburg since record-keeping began had slept in beds along these “geopathic” stress lines, leading von Pohl to the unfounded claim that cancer was a disease of location and to the genesis of the term “geopathic stress.”

According to geopathy advocates, Earth emits energies that can cause ill health in humans—the very definition of geopathic stress. Tunnels, sewers, geological faults, pipes, mineral deposits, utility lines, and underground water are all supposedly points where a “certain energy vibration” from Earth gets distorted. Geopathic stress proponents say you should avoid spending too much time in/on/around these distortion points, or you will experience fatigue, headaches, insomnia, and overall very negative feelings. (Some of the most hardcore advocates say that even machinery can break down when placed in geopathic stress zones.)

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The good news is that no serious scientific research has explicitly linked fault lines with cancer, bad vibrations since the German aristocrat’s days. However, because there are so many environmental factors that affect our bodies, it’s impossible to isolate the direct effects Earth has on us, according to Jorge Sanjurjo-Sánchez, an associate professor at the University Institute in Geology Isidro Parga Pondal and the University of A Coruña in Spain.

And if Earth’s radiation or vibration does have direct health effects on us, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Sanjurjo-Sánchez explains, because Earth could nurture us much like a real mother. “Low doses of gamma radiation from the ground, a form of radiation more powerful than X-rays, might even be beneficial,” he tells Popular Mechanics, citing the elevated lifespans in places like the Greek island of Ikaria, where this phenomenon occurs. Apparently, places do have their own powers.

The Power of Expectation

Still, our own associations and expectations could be even more powerful than emotional residue or geopathic stress.

If we expect something to feel a certain way—say, happy or sad—that can strongly influence our perceptions; such is the power of expectations. If you have positive or negative associations when it comes to certain landscape features, for instance, this could have an impact on how you feel and function beneath your ability to understand it.

“Studies in which participants predicted the mood of a character based on the emotions of a person who previously lived in their apartment, or chose a room based on a sign on a door, reinforce an old point in psychology, which is that we quickly and automatically form associations, and those can influence attitudes and behavior,” John Coley, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, tells Popular Mechanics.

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“Research from my lab shows that people who grow up in urban environments tend to associate themselves with features of the built environment, whereas those who grow up in rural environments tend to associate themselves with features of the natural environment,” Coley says. Moving from the city to the countryside or vice versa could therefore cause stress.

“If I grow up in the country and then move to New York, outwardly I might love the hustle and bustle and the constant buzz of energy, but deep down, the sense that this isn’t me, even if I’m not aware of it, might take a toll,” he says. So the abandoned house across the street may not actually be haunted, even if it makes your chest tight when you near it; perhaps you simply are from a neighborhood where there are few blighted or neglected properties.

Putting It All Together

Over 60 million people have visited Auschwitz by now. The place is hailed as the “epitome of dark tourism,” a hotly criticized type of travel that involves visiting places historically connected to death, tragedy, and the macabre. There’s even an entire Netflix series called “Dark Tourist” that takes viewers to places like the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and a lake in Kazakhstan formed from a nuclear blast.
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Whether you’re visiting a place like the National September 11 Memorial Museum in Manhattan or a former concentration camp, immersing ourselves in tragedy can give us significant time to reflect on past history—and our own humanity. So next time you get the heebie-jeebies in a place, know that there’s at least a possibility that the place is charged with emotion ... but don’t lose sight of the power of your own mind to concoct those bad vibes.

STAV DIMITROPOULOS science writing has appeared online or in print for the BBC, Discover, Scientific American, Nature, Science, Runner’s World, The Daily Beast and others.

Scientists identify neurons in the brain that drive competition and social behavior within groups

Date: March 16, 2022

Source: Massachusetts General Hospital

Summary: In mice, social ranking in a group was linked to the results of competition, and certain neurons in the brain stored this social ranking information to inform decisions. Manipulating the activity of these neurons could increase or decrease an animal's competitive effort and therefore control their ability to successfully compete against others.

New research in mice has identified neurons in the brain that influence competitive interactions between individuals and that play a critical role in shaping the social behavior of groups. Published in Nature by a team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the findings will be useful not only for scientists interested in human interactions but also for those who study neurocognitive conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia that are characterized by altered social behavior.


"Social interactions in humans and animals occur most commonly in large groups, and these group interactions play a prominent role in sociology, ecology, psychology, economics and political science," says lead author S. William Li, an MD/PhD student at MGH. "What processes in the brain drive the complex dynamic behavior of social groups remains poorly understood, in part because most neuroscience research thus far has focused on the behaviors of pairs of individuals interacting alone. Here, we were able to study the behavior of groups by developing a paradigm in which large cohorts of mice were wirelessly tracked across thousands of unique competitive group interactions."

Li and his colleagues found that the animals' social ranking in the group was closely linked to the results of competition, and by examining recordings from neurons in the brains of mice in real time, the team discovered that neurons in the anterior cingulate region of the brain store this social ranking information to inform upcoming decisions.

"Collectively, these neurons held remarkably detailed representations of the group's behavior and their dynamics as the animals competed together for food, in addition to information about the resources available and the outcome of their past interactions," explains senior author Ziv M. Williams, MD, a neurosurgical oncologist at MGH. "Together, these neurons could even predict the animal's own future success well before competition onset, meaning that they likely drove the animals' competitive behavior based on whom they interacted with."

Manipulating the activity of these neurons, on the other hand, could artificially increase or decrease an animal's competitive effort and therefore control their ability to successfully compete against others. "In other words, we could tune up and down the animal's competitive drive and do so selectively without affecting other aspects of their behavior such as simple speed or motivation," says Williams.

The findings indicate that competitive success is not simply a product of an animal's physical fitness or strength, but rather, is strongly influenced by signals in the brain that affect competitive drive. "These unique neurons are able to integrate information about the individual's environment, social group settings, and reward resources to calculate how to best behave under specific conditions," says Li.

In addition to providing insights into group behavior and competition in different sociologic or economic situations and other settings, identifying the neurons that control these characteristics may help scientists design experiments to better understand scenarios in which the brain is wired differently. "Many conditions manifest in aberrant social behavior that spans many dimensions, including one's ability to understand social norms and to display actions that may fit the dynamical structure of social groups," says Williams. "Developing an understanding of group behavior and competition holds relevance to these neurocognitive disorders, but until now, how this happens in the brain has largely remained unexplored."

Additional co-authors include Omer Zeliger, Leah Strahs, Raymundo Báez-Mendoza, Lance M. Johnson, and Adian McDonald Wojciechowski.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the Autism Science Foundation, an MGH-ECOR Fund for Medical Discovery Fellowship, and a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Journal Reference:
S. William Li, Omer Zeliger, Leah Strahs, Raymundo Báez-Mendoza, Lance M. Johnson, Aidan McDonald Wojciechowski, Ziv M. Williams. Frontal neurons driving competitive behaviour and ecology of social groups. Nature, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04000-5

Office buildings with infrequent water use may have poor water quality

Study suggests buildings with 'green' plumbing should test drinking water for safety

Date: March 9, 2022

Source: PLOS

Low-consumption office buildings with infrequent water use could have chemical and microbiological safety issues, according to a study published in PLOS Water by Andrew Whelton at Purdue University, Indiana, United States, and colleagues. The research could have implications for office buildings used less frequently during pandemic lockdowns, and suggests that regular water testing in commercial buildings may be needed.

Many office buildings have decreased occupancy during weekends and holidays -- and recently, during pandemic lockdowns -- increasing water stagnation in plumbing. Green buildings are designed to reduce water consumption using efficient fixtures and alternative water supplies. However, due to the combination of lower building water use and low occupancy periods, the safety of water from green buildings is unknown. To better understand chemical and microbiological quality in a green commercial office building plumbing after weekend stagnation, researchers sampled water from a ten-year-old, three story, LEED-certified office building in Indiana between January and February 2020. Samples from all water sources in the building were tested for pH, metals, ions, as well as bacterial strains of Legionella.

Researchers found that copper and lead levels increased over the weekend, and that Legionella counts were highest at a fixture which had no use recorded during sampling. Additionally, the concentration of the disinfectant chlorine decreased over the weekend. The study had several limitations as it relied on self-reported data for measurements of fixture use and may have misreported usage frequency at some locations. Future studies are needed to further analyze how water-saving appliances may impact water quality.

According to the authors, "To prepare plumbing to code, water chemical and microbiological testing is not required or recommended. The green office building studied had many features that are increasingly common in new buildings, including low-flow faucets, automatic faucets, and alternative piping systems for major water uses like toilet flushing and irrigation. These design elements can change water temperature profiles and significantly reduce the amount of water used compared to traditional office buildings, raising concerns for water quality degradation."

The authors add: "The first people in the office on a Monday morning may, in fact, be using contaminated drinking water. To better understand if the water we are using is safe, much more water testing at the faucet must be conducted. Plumbing design standards and codes must also be revised."


Journal Reference:
Elizabeth Montagnino, Caitlin R. Proctor, Kyungyeon Ra, Christian Ley, Yoorae Noh, Katie Vigil, Tiong Gim Aw, Sruthi Dasika, Andrew J. Whelton. Over the weekend: Water stagnation and contaminant exceedances in a green office building. PLOS Water, 2022; 1 (3): e0000006 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000006