It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
Plastic Pollution in the Ocean May Harbor Novel Antibiotics
ByAMERICAN SOCIETY FOR MICROBIOLOGYJUNE 12, 2022
According to new research, plastic pollution in the ocean may serve as a source for new antibiotics
These disparate issues come together in new research, where scientists have found that ocean plastic pollution could be a source for new antibiotics that may be effective against effective antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains.
Plastic pollution in the ocean may serve as a source for novel antibiotics, according to a new student-led study conducted in collaboration with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The research will be presented at the American Society for Microbiology’s conference in Washington, D.C. on June 9-13, 2022.
Scientists estimate between 5 and 13 million metric tons of plastic pollution enter the oceans each year, ranging from large floating debris to microplastics onto which microbes can form entire ecosystems. Plastic debris is rich in biomass, and therefore could be a good candidate for antibiotic production, which tends to occur in highly competitive natural environments.
To explore the potential of the plastisphere to be a source of novel antibiotics, the researchers modified the Tiny Earth citizen science approach (developed by Dr. Jo Handelsman) to marine conditions. The researchers incubated high- and low-density polyethylene plastic (the type commonly seen in grocery bags) in water near Scripps Pier in La Jolla, California for 90 days
The researchers isolated 5 antibiotic-producing bacteria from ocean plastic, including strains of Bacillus, Phaeobacter, and Vibrio. They tested the bacterial isolates against a variety of Gram-positive and negative targets, finding the isolates to be effective against commonly used bacteria as well as 2 antibiotic-resistant strains.
“Considering the current antibiotic crisis and the rise of superbugs, it is essential to look for alternative sources of novel antibiotics,” said study lead author Andrea Price of National University. “We hope to expand this project and further characterize the microbes and the antibiotics they produce.”
This project was part of a STEM education project funded by the National Science Foundation.
Meeting: Microbe 2022
A City-Sized 'Eye' Has Been Discovered on Mars
The Martian crater is 18 miles wide and looks eerily like an eye, according to the European Space Agency.
ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.
If you stare long enough at Mars, Mars might start to stare back.
That’s the eerie effect of a huge Martian crater that resembles an eye in a new image captured from outer space by the European Space Agency (ESA) orbiter Mars Express. It follows a slew of other intriguing snapshots taken by rovers on the surface of Mars this year, including a rock formation that looks like a doorway, as well as spikes shaped like plant stems.
Snapped by the orbiter on April 25, the image reveals some of the mysterious features of the unexplored and unnamed crater, which stretches across a city-sized 18 miles of a region called Aonia Terra, located in the southern highlands of Mars, according to ESA. The formation is surrounded by ancient evidence of water flowing across the Martian surface in channels, when the red planet was warmer, wetter, and potentially habitable.
“Conjuring images of veins running through a human eyeball, these channels are likely to have carried liquid water across the surface of Mars around 3.5–4 billion years ago,” ESA said in the statement. “The channels appear to be partly filled with a dark material, and in some places, seem to actually be raised above the surrounding land.”
The agency said that these strange features, which are still not understood, could be the result of either hardy sediments or lava flows filling the channels.
The crater is just one of many fascinating formations in Aonia Terra, a region that may have been doused with periodic flows of liquid meltwater within the last million years, a finding that “points to more habitable recent environments than previously predicted” on the red planet, according to a 2015 paper in Nature Communications.
Eerie crater that looks like a watching eye has been discovered on the surface of Mars
It is said to be the size of a city, with the dark matter in the middle giving the appearance of a gigantic eye watching spacecrafts as they fly past The crater is said to be the size of a city Image: ESA/DLR/FU/Triangle News
Data from Hubble, which was launched in 1990, has helped identify 40 "milepost markers” for space and time to measure the rate.
But Nasa scientists are baffled as there seems to be a discrepancy between its current rate when compared to observations from after the Big Bang, said to have been around 14 billion years ago.
ESA said the chilling crater conjures up “images of veins running through a human eyeball” due to winding channels around it
(Image: NASA/Triangle News)
The organisation said in a statement: “Pursuit of the universe's expansion rate began in the 1920s with measurements by astronomers Edwin P. Hubble and Georges Lemaître.
“In 1998, this led to the discovery of "dark energy," a mysterious repulsive force accelerating the universe's expansion.
“In recent years, thanks to data from Hubble and other telescopes, astronomers found another twist: a discrepancy between the expansion rate as measured in the local universe compared to independent observations from right after the big bang, which predict a different expansion value.
Data from Hubble, which was launched in 1990, has helped identify 40 "milepost markers” for space and time to measure the rate ( Image: NASA/Triangle News)
Starquakes! Gaia Spacecraft Sees Strange Stars in Most Detailed Milky Way Survey to Date
By EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY (ESA)
JUNE 13, 2022
One of the surprising discoveries coming out of Gaia data release 3, is that Gaia is able to detect starquakes – tiny motions on the surface of a star – that change the shapes of stars, something the observatory was not originally built for. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0
Gaia is a mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) to create an precise three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond. Although it launched all the way back in 2013, it is still working to accurately map the the motions, luminosity, temperature and composition of the stars in our galaxy.
Today marks the data of the third data release from Gaia. The first data release was on September 14, 2016, followed by the second data release on April 25, 2018. On December 3, 2020, they did an early third data release with detailed data on more than 1.8 billion stars. All this data is helping to reveal the origin, structure, and evolutionary history of our galaxy.
Today (June 13, 2022), ESA’s Gaia mission releases its new treasure trove of data about our home galaxy. Astronomers describe strange ‘starquakes’, stellar DNA, asymmetric motions, and other fascinating insights in this most detailed Milky Way survey to date
Gaia is ESA’s mission to create the most accurate and complete multi-dimensional map of the Milky Way. This allows astronomers to reconstruct our home galaxy’s structure and past evolution over billions of years, and to better understand the lifecycle of stars and our place in the Universe
What’s new in data release 3?
Gaia’s data release 3 contains new and improved details for almost two billion stars in our galaxy. The catalog includes new information including chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colors, masses, ages, and the speed at which stars move towards or away from us (radial velocity). Much of this information was revealed by the newly released spectroscopy data, a technique in which the starlight is split into its constituent colors (like a rainbow). The data also includes special subsets of stars, like those that change brightness over time.
Also new in this data set is the largest catalog yet of binary stars, thousands of Solar System objects such as asteroids and moons of planets, and millions of galaxies and quasars outside the Milky Way
GAIA-- ARTIST CONCEPTION
Starquakes
One of the most surprising discoveries coming out of the new data is that Gaia is able to detect starquakes – tiny motions on the surface of a star – that change the shapes of stars, something the observatory was not originally built for.
Previously, Gaia already found radial oscillations that cause stars to swell and shrink periodically, while keeping their spherical shape. But Gaia has now also spotted other vibrations that are more like large-scale tsunamis. These nonradial oscillations change the global shape of a star and are therefore harder to detect.
Gaia found strong nonradial starquakes in thousands of stars. Gaia also revealed such vibrations in stars that have seldomly been seen before. These stars should not have any quakes according to the current theory, while Gaia did detect them at their surface.
“Starquakes teach us a lot about stars, notably their internal workings. Gaia is opening a goldmine for ‘asteroseismology’ of massive stars,” says Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration.
The DNA of stars
What stars are made of can tell us about their birthplace and their journey afterward, and therefore about the history of the Milky Way. With today’s data release, Gaia is revealing the largest chemical map of the galaxy coupled to 3D motions, from our solar neighborhood to smaller galaxies surrounding ours.
Some stars contain more ‘heavy metals’ than others. During the Big Bang, only light elements were formed (hydrogen and helium). All other heavier elements – called metals by astronomers – are built inside stars. When stars die, they release these metals into the gas and dust between the stars called the interstellar medium, out of which new stars form. Active star formation and death will lead to an environment that is richer in metals. Therefore, a star’s chemical composition is a bit like its DNA, giving us crucial information about its origin.
This image shows an artistic impression of the Milky Way, and on top of that an overlay showing the location and densities of a young star sample from Gaia’s data release 3 (in yellow-green). The “you are here” sign points towards the Sun.
With Gaia, we see that some stars in our galaxy are made of primordial material, while others like our Sun are made of matter enriched by previous generations of stars. Stars that are closer to the center and plane of our galaxy are richer in metals than stars at larger distances. Gaia also identified stars that originally came from different galaxies than our own, based on their chemical composition.
“Our galaxy is a beautiful melting pot of stars,” says Alejandra Recio-Blanco of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration.
“This diversity is extremely important, because it tells us the story of our galaxy’s formation. It reveals the processes of migration within our galaxy and accretion from external galaxies. It also clearly shows that our Sun, and we, all belong to an ever-changing system, formed thanks to the assembly of stars and gas of different origins.”
Other papers that are published today reflect the breadth and depth of Gaia’s discovery potential. A new binary star catalog presents the mass and evolution of more than 800 thousand binary systems, while a new asteroid survey comprising 156 thousand rocky bodies is digging deeper into the origin of our Solar System. Gaia is also revealing information about 10 million variable stars, mysterious macro-molecules between stars, as well as quasars and galaxies beyond our own cosmic neighborhood.
“Unlike other missions that target specific objects, Gaia is a survey mission. This means that while surveying the entire sky with billions of stars multiple times, Gaia is bound to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss. This is one of its strengths, and we can’t wait for the astronomy community to dive into our new data to find out even more about our galaxy and its surroundings than we could’ve imagined,” says Timo Prusti, Project Scientist for Gaia at ESA.
OOPS SORRY ABOUT THAT
Private Space Company Botches Second NASA Mission After Launch Malfunction
Astra shared its "regrets" over the loss of the NASA spacecraft following a premature shutdown of one of its rocket stages.
The space company Astra failed to deliver two NASA weather satellites into orbit on one of its rockets on Sunday, resulting in the loss of the spacecraft.
The malfunction, which was caused by the premature shutdown of one of the rocket’s engines, marks the company’s second botched attempt to launch NASA satellites this year, following a February mission that ended in failure when the rocket spun out of control.
Astra noted that the first stage of the rocket, which is located on the bottom of the vehicle, operated normally, propelling the vehicle along its planned trajectory for several minutes after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 1:43 PM Eastern Time.
But the second stage engine switched off about 10 minutes into the flight, resulting in the loss of a pair of satellites that belong to a NASA constellation called the Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission, which aims to improve real-time monitoring of tropical storms.
“We had a nominal first stage flight,” the company said in a tweet. “The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit. We have shared our regrets with @NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data review.”
Astra won a $7.95 million contract from NASA to deliver a total of six TROPICS satellites into orbit over the course of three launches. It’s not known when the company will send the remainder of the constellation, which consists of small spacecraft known as CubeSats, into orbit.
“While we are disappointed in the loss of the two TROPICS CubeSats, the mission is part of NASA’s Earth venture program, which provides opportunities for lower-cost, higher risk missions,” NASA said in a statement on Sunday. “Despite a loss of the first two of six satellites, the TROPICS constellation will still meet its science objectives with the four remaining CubeSats distributed in two orbits. With four satellites, TROPICS will still provide improved time-resolved observations of tropical cyclones compared to traditional observing methods.”
“As a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) licensed mission, the FAA and Astra will lead the investigation to understand what happened during the TROPICS-1 launch,” according to the statement. “NASA will lend any expertise needed but would expect to pause the launch effort with Astra while an investigation is being conducted to ensure we move forward when ready.”
Although the destruction of NASA satellites presents a major setback for the company, Astra has successfully launched two other missions from Alaska, starting with a US Space Force project in November 2021, followed by a variety of small satellites in March.
The World’s Top Coal Exporter Can’t Afford To Go Green
Indonesia is facing an uphill battle in its push to transition away from coal.
As the world’s top coal exporter, kicking the fossil fuel will potentially cost billions.
Further complicating the issue, Indonesia has a massive surplus of coal on its hands after it was heavily over-invested in the sector in past decades.
How much will it cost to wean Indonesia off coal? This is a pressing question for world leaders and climate policy-makers around the world in the lead-up to this year’s COP27 climate summit, set to take place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt this November. Just before the summit, in which the world’s premier politicians, scientists, policymakers, and industry leaders convene to set goals, broker deals, and make concrete agendas to meet the emissions standards set by the Paris climate agreement in 2015, G-20 leaders are meeting in Bali to try to ink a deal to wean the world’s biggest coal exporter off of the dirty fossil fuel. But it won’t come easy.
Indonesia ranks high on the COP27 agenda as it represents one of the biggest hurdles to phasing out coal on a global scale, a necessary component of all pathways to lowering global emissions enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that the world will have to shut down all coal-fired stations by 2040 at the latest, and had previously urged that the world must reach peach coal by 2020. Instead, the world saw an enormous rebound of coal use in 2021, as ongoing pandemic woes coupled with sanctions on Russian energy caused energy prices to skyrocket.
The renewed vitality of the coal industry is one of many obstacles standing in the way of weaning Indonesia off of coal. The Southeast Asian island nation has the fourth biggest population in the world, and the third biggest coal-fired power capacity, after India and China, making it one of just a few countries with the power to make or break the Paris agreement. But coal is deeply embedded in the economic and political machinations of the country, and getting rid of it will not be easy.
The Indonesian parliament just drafted a “clean energy” bill that prominently features the continued use of coal, to the dismay and outrage of environmental experts and climate advocates. According to the Indonesia Mining Advocacy Network, a watchdog agency, as much as 50% of the country’s 575 members of parliament are directly connected to the mining sector. The Indonesian workers who rely on coal for their livelihoods are also pushing back against climate efforts, and are advocating to keep raising coal output targets while the market is hot.
Further complicating the issue, Indonesia has a massive surplus of coal on its hands after it was heavily over-invested in the sector in past decades. Convincing them not to make use of this cheap and abundant energy source will be difficult – and expensive. This is what’s on the minds of the world’s richest nations as they work toward brokering one of their trickiest deals yet on the eve of COP27. “Indonesia will be our next partnership,” US Treasury Climate Counselor John Morton was quoted by Bloomberg this week. "If this were easy, it would have been done years ago. Countries could have managed this on their own,” he said. “We're talking about economy-wide economic transitions of energy sectors, which are huge political beasts."
So far, the world’s richest nations have not made good on their promises to provide climate finance to the world’s poorest countries. Global leaders have recognized that this kind of economic cooperation is fundamental to a successful energy transition and pathway to 1.5 degrees, and had promised 12 years ago to give $100 billion in climate finance to poor countries by 2020. They broke their promise. But at last year’s COP26 in Glasgow, the pledge was reinstated. Now the G-20, a group of 19 nations and the European Union representing 90% of the gross world product, is headed to Bali to put some of that money where its mouth is and make a Just Energy Transition Partnership with Indonesia to help “break the status quo,” in the words of U.S. climate envoy John Kerry
It will be a huge uphill battle, but already The Asian Development Bank has launched a multi-billion dollar plan to help Indonesia and the Philippines phase out half of their coal plants over the next 10 to 15 years, and Indonesia has promised to retire some stations earlier than planned if it’s economically viable. Breaking Indonesia of its coal habit will cost the world billions more in climate finance, but experts will tell you it’s a small price to pay for avoiding catastrophic climate change.
Oilprice.com
The Collapse of an Atlantic Ocean Current Would Ripple Across The World, Says Study (cookelma/iStock/Getty Images)
MATTHEW ENGLAND ET AL., THE CONVERSATION 13 JUNE 2022
Climate change is slowing down the conveyor belt of ocean currents that brings warm water from the tropics up to the North Atlantic.
Our research, published today (June 6) in Nature Climate Change, looks at the profound consequences to global climate if this Atlantic conveyor collapses entirely.
We found the collapse of this system – called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – would shift the Earth's climate to a more La Niña-like state.
This would mean more flooding rains over eastern Australia and worse droughts and bushfire seasons over southwest United States.
East-coast Australians know what unrelenting La Niña feels like. Climate change has loaded our atmosphere with moister air, while two summers of La Niña warmed the ocean north of Australia.
Both contributed to some of the wettest conditions ever experienced, with record-breaking floods in New South Wales and Queensland.
Earth's climate is dynamic, variable, and ever-changing. But our current trajectory of unabated greenhouse gas emissions is giving the whole system a giant kick that'll have uncertain consequences – consequences that'll rewrite our textbook description of the planet's ocean circulation and its impact.
What is the Atlantic overturning meridional circulation?
The Atlantic overturning circulation comprises a massive flow of warm tropical water to the North Atlantic that helps keep European climate mild, while allowing the tropics a chance to lose excess heat. An equivalent overturning of Antarctic waters can be found in the Southern Hemisphere.
Climate records reaching back 120,000 years reveal the Atlantic overturning circulation has switched off, or dramatically slowed, during ice ages.
It switches on and placates European climate during so-called 'interglacial periods', when the Earth's climate is warmer.
Since human civilization began around 5,000 years ago, the Atlantic overturning has been relatively stable. But over the past few decades, a slowdown has been detected, and this has scientists worried.
Why the slowdown? One unambiguous consequence of global warming is the melting of polar ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica.
When these icecaps melt they dump massive amounts of freshwater into the oceans, making water more buoyant and reducing the sinking of dense water at high latitudes.
Around Greenland alone, a massive 5 trillion tons of ice has melted in the past 20 years. That's equivalent to 10,000 Sydney Harbours worth of freshwater.
This melt rate is set to increase over the coming decades if global warming continues unabated.
A collapse of the North Atlantic and Antarctic overturning circulations would profoundly alter the anatomy of the world's oceans.
It would make them fresher at depth, deplete them of oxygen, and starve the upper ocean of the upwelling of nutrients provided when deep waters resurface from the ocean abyss. The implications for marine ecosystems would be profound.
With Greenland ice melt already well underway, scientists estimate the Atlantic overturning is at its weakest for at least the last millennium, with predictions of a future collapse on the cards in coming centuries if greenhouse gas emissions go unchecked.
The ramifications of a slowdown
In our study, we used a comprehensive global model to examine what Earth's climate would look like under such a collapse.
We switched the Atlantic overturning off by applying a massive meltwater anomaly to the North Atlantic, and then compared this to an equivalent run with no meltwater applied.
Our focus was to look beyond the well-known regional impacts around Europe and North America, and to check how Earth's climate would change in remote locations, as far south as Antarctica.
The first thing the model simulations revealed was that without the Atlantic overturning, a massive pile up of heat builds up just south of the Equator.
This excess of tropical Atlantic heat pushes more warm moist air into the upper troposphere (around 10 kilometers into the atmosphere), causing dry air to descend over the east Pacific.
The descending air then strengthens trade winds, which pushes warm water toward the Indonesian seas. And this helps put the tropical Pacific into a La Niña-like state.
Australians may think of La Niña summers as cool and wet. But under the long-term warming trend of climate change, their worst impacts will be flooding rain, especially over the east.
We also show an Atlantic overturning shutdown would be felt as far south as Antarctica. Rising warm air over the West Pacific would trigger wind changes that propagate south to Antarctica. This would deepen the atmospheric low-pressure system over the Amundsen Sea, which sits off west Antarctica.
This low-pressure system is known to influence ice sheet and ice shelf melt, as well as ocean circulation and sea-ice extent as far west as the Ross Sea. A new world order
At no time in Earth's history, giant meteorites and super-volcanos aside, has our climate system been jolted by changes in atmospheric gas composition like what we are imposing today by our unabated burning of fossil fuels.
The oceans are the flywheel of Earth's climate, slowing the pace of change by absorbing heat and carbon in vast quantities. But there is payback, with sea level rise, ice melt, and a significant slowdown of the Atlantic overturning circulation projected for this century.
Now we know this slowdown will not just affect the North Atlantic region, but as far away as Australia and Antarctica.
We can prevent these changes from happening by growing a new low-carbon economy. Doing so will change, for the second time in less than a century, the course of Earth's climate history – this time for the better.
Mexican president AMLO slams NATO policy in Ukraine calling it “immoral.”
Mon, June 13, 2022
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president slammed NATO’s policy on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Monday, calling it “immoral.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s did not mention NATO or the United States by name, but his comments were the latest example of his party's ambiguous stance on the invasion.
Mexico has voted to condemn the invasion, but refused to join in sanctions on Russia.
López Obrador said Monday that the allies’ policy was equivalent to saying “I’ll supply the weapons, and you supply the dead. It is immoral.”
“How easy it is to say, ‘Here, I’ll send you this much money for weapons,” Lopez Obrador said. “Couldn't the war in Ukraine have been avoided? Of course it could.”
In March, a half-dozen legislators from López Obrador’s Morena party helped create a congressional “Mexico-Russia Friendship Committee.”
The Morena party said “we respect the freedom of thought of our members” after a youth group apparently affiliated with the party sent an open letter to the Russian ambassador supporting the invasion.
Mastodon tusk chemical analysis reveals first evidence of one extinct animal's annual migration
University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher with the mounted skeleton of the Buesching mastodon, based on casts of individual bones produced in fiberglass, on public display at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor. Credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.
Around 13,200 years ago, a roving male mastodon died in a bloody mating-season battle with a rival in what today is northeast Indiana, nearly 100 miles from his home territory, according to the first study to document the annual migration of an individual animal from an extinct species.
The 8-ton adult, known as the Buesching mastodon, was killed when an opponent punctured the right side of his skull with a tusk tip, a mortal wound that was revealed to researchers when the animal's remains were recovered from a peat farm near Fort Wayne in 1998.
Northeast Indiana was likely a preferred summer mating ground for this solitary rambler, who made the trek annually during the last three years of his life, venturing north from his cold-season home, according to a paper scheduled for online publication June 13 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study also shows that the Buesching bull may have spent time exploring central and southern Michigan, which seems fitting for a creature whose full-size fiberglass-cast skeleton is on display at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor.
"The result that is unique to this study is that for the first time, we've been able to document the annual overland migration of an individual from an extinct species," said University of Cincinnati paleoecologist Joshua Miller, the study's first author.
"Using new modeling techniques and a powerful geochemical toolkit, we've been able to show that large male mastodons like Buesching migrated every year to the mating grounds."
U-M paleontologist and study co-leader Daniel Fisher participated in the Buesching mastodon excavation 24 years ago. He later used a bandsaw to cut a thin, lengthwise slab from the center of the animal's banana-shaped, 9.5-foot right tusk, which is longer and more completely preserved than the left.
"You've got a whole life spread out before you in that tusk," said Fisher, who has studied mastodons and mammoths for more than 40 years and helped excavate several dozen of the extinct elephant relatives.
"The growth and development of the animal, as well as its history of changing land use and changing behavior—all of that history is captured and recorded in the structure and composition of the tusk," said Fisher, a professor of earth and environmental sciences, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and a curator at the U-M Museum of Paleontology.
The team's analyses revealed that the Buesching mastodon's original home range was likely in central Indiana. Like modern-day elephants, the young male stayed close to home until he separated from the female-led herd as an adolescent.
As a lone adult, Buesching traveled farther and more frequently, often covering nearly 20 miles per month, according to the researchers. Also, his landscape use varied with the seasons, including a dramatic northward expansion into a summer-only region that included parts of northeastern Indiana—the presumed mating grounds.
"Every time you get to the warm season, the Buesching mastodon was going to the same place—bam, bam, bam—repeatedly. The clarity of that signal was unexpected and really exciting," said Miller, who has used similar isotopic techniques to study the migration of caribou in Alaska and Canada.
Under harsh Pleistocene climates, migration and other forms of seasonally patterned landscape use were likely critical for the reproductive success of mastodons and other large mammals. However, little is known about how their geographic ranges and mobility fluctuated seasonally or changed with sexual maturity, according to the new study.
The left half of the Buesching mastodon's right tusk. Numbers on the side of the tusk (12-14) indicate where specific annual layers (counting from the tip of the tusk to the end of life at the base) are exposed on the tusk surface. Credit: Jeremy Marble, University of Michigan News.
But techniques to analyze the ratios of various forms, or isotopes, of the elements strontium and oxygen in ancient tusks are helping scientists unlock some of those secrets.
Mastodons, mammoths and modern elephants, which are part of a group of large, flexible-trunked mammals called proboscideans, have elongated upper incisor teeth that emerge from their skulls as tusks. In each year of the animal's life, new growth layers are deposited upon those already present, laid down in alternating light and dark bands.
The yearly growth layers in a tusk are somewhat analogous to a tree's annual rings, except that each new tusk layer forms near the center, while new growth in trees occurs in a layer of cells next to the bark. The growth layers in a tusk resemble an inverted stack of ice cream cones, with the time of death recorded at the base and the time of birth at the tip.
Mastodons were herbivores that browsed on trees and shrubs. As they grew, chemical elements in their food and drinking water were incorporated into their body tissues, including the gracefully tapered, ever-growing tusks.
In the newly published study, strontium and oxygen isotopes in tusk growth layers enabled the researchers to reconstruct Buesching's travels as an adolescent and as a reproductively active adult. Thirty-six samples were collected from the adolescent years (during and after departure from the matriarchal herd), and 30 samples were collected from the animal's final years of life.
A tiny drill bit, operated under a microscope, was used to grind half a millimeter from the edge of individual growth layers, each of which covered a period of one to two months in the animal's life. The powder produced during this milling process was collected and chemically analyzed.
Ratios of strontium isotopes in the tusk provided geographic fingerprints that were matched to specific locations on maps showing how strontium changes across the landscape. Oxygen isotope values, which show pronounced seasonal fluctuations, helped the researchers determine the time of year a specific tusk layer formed.
Closeup showing pieces of a mastodon tusk (not from the Buesching mastodon) held by University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher. In Fisher's right hand is a block from near the base of the tusk, showing layers representing the last six years of life. A cross-section of a mastodon tusk tip, in Fisher's left hand, shows concentric annual tusk layers. Credit: Jeremy Marble, University of Michigan News.
Because both strontium and oxygen isotope samples were collected from the same narrow growth layers, the researchers were able to reach specific conclusions about where Buesching journeyed during different times of year, and how old he was when he made each trip.
Then, isotopic data from the tusks were entered into a spatially explicit movement model developed by Miller and his colleagues. The model enabled the team to estimate how far the animal was moving and the probabilities of movement between candidate locations—something absent from previous studies of extinct-animal movements.
"The field of strontium isotope geochemistry is a real up-and-coming tool for paleontology, archaeology, historical ecology, and even forensic biology. It's flourishing," Miller said. "But, really, we have just scratched the surface of what this information can tell us."
Fisher and Miller said the next step in their mastodon research project is to analyze the tusks of a different individual, either another male or a female.
More information:Male mastodon landscape use changed with maturation (late Pleistocene, North America),Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(2022).DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2118329119.
Chile government to consider copper producers’ cost variations in new royalty bill
Reuters | June 10, 2022 | Escondida copper mine in Chile. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
The disparity in costs faced by different copper mining companies in Chile will be taken into account in an industry-wide royalty planned by the government to help finance its ambitious social agenda, the undersecretary of Mining said on Friday.
A study by the national Chilean Copper Commission (Cochilco) revealed that the cash costs for Chile’s largest operators rose by 10 cents per pound in year-on-year terms in 2021, due to the lower quality of the ore as well as higher energy and transportation prices.
The document also states that smaller operators, consisting of those who produce less than 150,000 tonnes annually, have been the most affected by these changes.
“One of the important things that has been salvaged from everything that has been presented is the diversity in the mining sector,” Undersecretary Willy Kracht said at a conference while delivering the report.
“It seems to me that it is tremendously relevant to put this on the table when we are in the middle of discussions on the royalty. It seems that it is an element that must be considered,” he added.
In addition, Cochilco pointed out costs will likely rise again this year due to the crisis in Ukraine, and due to the persistent drought, which could lower production across some areas in Chile, the world’s largest producer of copper.
The government of President Gabriel Boric has made increasing tax collection on mining activity part of its broad tax reform plan, the full details of which should be announced in the coming weeks.
The project could replace or modify a controversial clause being considered in Congress, which the industry has harshly criticized for not considering the operational performance of each site.
In addition to the state-owned Codelco, global mining companies such as BHP, Glencore Plc, Anglo American and Antofagasta Plc operate in Chile.
(By Fabián Andrés Cambero and Isabel Woodford; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
In the centre of the crater, darker materials have created a shadowy dune that looks just like a pupil (
