Tuesday, June 14, 2022

WAIT TILL THEY WALK ON LAND

Blood-sucking, snake-like fish arrive in New Brunswick waterways to spawn

Video taken near Belleisle shows the parasitic fish spawning and building nests

Mia Urquhart · CBC News · Posted: Jun 13, 2022 7:00 AM AT | Last Updated: June 13

The mouth of a sea lamprey, a species of fish that attaches to a host, feeds on blood and has teeth on its tongue. (Tina Weltz/ROM)

It may be bad news that it's once again spawning season for the parasitic sea lamprey, meaning they're moving upriver in New Brunswick in droves.

But the good news is that they're so focused on spawning that their digestive systems shut down.

"They couldn't feed if they wanted to," said Marc Gaden, the communications director for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

"They have only one thing in mind once they reach that spawning phase, and that's to find a mate and to spawn successfully."

Sometimes mistakenly called an eel, the sea lamprey is a fish with a powerful suction cup of a mouth filled with multiple circular rows of horn-shaped teeth and a tongue that burrows into the body of the host so it can liquify its tissues and feed at will.

These lamprey spend a good part of their life at sea, attached to, and feeding off the blood of, other fish. But at this time of year, adults return to inland brooks and rivers to spawn.

Oana Birceanu, an assistant professor at Western University in Ontario, has been studying sea lamprey for years.

"I've worked with the sea lampreys for so many years, yet I've never seen them build their nests in the wild," said Birceanu.

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s website describes a lamprey's mouth as 'a large oral sucking disk filled with sharp, horn-shaped teeth surrounding a razor sharp rasping tongue.'

That's why she was fascinated by a video taken by Mike Sherwood near his Belleisle area home. It's underwater footage of several lamprey building nests in a brook in Midland.

"It's fascinating," Birceanu said after watching the video.

Sherwood's video show adult lamprey latching moving rocks around — some bigger than softballs.

Other parts of the video show them latched onto even bigger rocks with their powerful suction-cup mouths.

At one point, it even captures two fish spawning in one of the crescent-shaped nests they were working on.

Life cycle of lamprey

Birceanu said the males typically leave the Atlantic Ocean first and lead the way to the spawning grounds.

She said pheromones given off by the larvae from previous seasons that are still in the area help guide them. The females then follow those pheromones and the ones given off by the males, which begin working on the nests even before the females arrive.

She said sea lampreys seek out rocky areas to spawn because the rocks help protect the newly laid eggs. Ideally, they look for rocky terrain upstream and a silty bottom downstream.

The eggs develop into worm-like creatures that make their way to where they can burrow into the sandy bottom. They usually remain in this state, feeding off algae and decomposing matter, for three to seven years — and as long as 14 years in some cases, said Birceanu.

The head of a sea lamprey with its mouth closed, concealing the creepiness within.

Once they reach about 120 millimetres in length, they stop feeding and they go through a metamorphosis, where they transform into their adult bodies. This roughly two-month transformation even alters the way they breathe, so that they can continue to breathe while completely latched onto a host.

Once the transformation is complete, these juveniles head to the sea, where they attach to host fish and then feed at will as the host goes on with life.

Then, when it's time to spawn, lampreys return to inland waters to start the cycle all over again. But once finished, both males and females die.

"They exert all of their energy in that spawning phase, and they die after spawning," said Gaden.

Same fish, different story

Sea lampreys are native to Atlantic Canada. They are part of the ecosystem, and other species have learned to evolve with them. They are even beneficial to fish such as salmon, by returning valuable nutrients to the environment when scores of them die after spawning.

But in other places, they are an invasive species that has altered the ecosystem and decimated other fish populations.

The Great Lakes were particularly hard hit after new canals opened up new habitat for sea lampreys in the mid-1900s.

Gaden said the sea lampreys' scientific name means stone sucker.

"The power of that suction cup is also what makes the sea lamprey so lethal in the Great Lakes," he said.

Marc Gaden is communications director and legislative liaison for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. (Submitted by Marc Gaden)

They latch onto fish and their tongue drills through the scales and skin of their host and feed on the blood and tissue, usually killing the host.

"Very often in their native range in the Atlantic, the sea lamprey will be a true parasite. That is, it might be able to feed off of the fish and not kill the host and then maybe move on to another species."

But in the Great Lakes, the native species aren't large enough to survive their parasitic hitchhikers, and millions of fish were killed in the process.

Gaden said a single sea lamprey can feed and kill off about 40 pounds of fish in about two years.

For decades, the Great Lakes Fisher Commission has been working to get control over the lamprey population. Each year, they spread lampricide in waterways to kill the larvae by the millions.

Sea lamprey populations in Lake Superior are on the way back up ,according to Alex Gonzalez of the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service. (photo credit: T. Lawrence GLFC)

Without such vigilant and sustained efforts, Gaden said it wouldn't take long for sea lampreys to flourish again. After all, each female is capable of laying between 50,000 and 120,000 eggs. And without any natural predators, the comeback would be swift.

"Sea lamprey are very opportunistic. If you ease up control even briefly, they'll bounce back in the matter of a couple of years."

The commission keeps a running tally on its website of how many sea lampreys have been killed so far this year. The counter is currently at more than 2.5 million.

Since their numbers peaked, Gaden said the eradication efforts have reduced sea lamprey by 95 per cent, "and that saves well over 110 million pounds of Great Lakes fish a year."

'A great parlour trick'

Gaden helps run the commission public awareness campaign, where he takes live sea lampreys on the road. He said they make "a great parlour trick" and he's lost count of the number of times he's had one attached to his flesh.

He said it's a demonstration of how powerful the suction is, but since lampreys don't feed on warm-blooded animals, they don't drill into humans with their tongue.

Gaden said it's impossible to pull the fish off once they latch. It shows how impossible it would be for a host fish to shake one off itself. He said it takes some effort to squeeze the sides of its mouth until the suction is broken with an audible pop.

Hamilton Mountain MP Lisa Hepfner with a sea lamprey attached to her hand, along with Niagara Centre MP Vance Badawey on Parliament Hill in April. (Submitted by Marc Gaden)

"You do have to break the seal. You can't just pull it off. I've heard it described as about as powerful as a shop vac."

Gaden recently took his lamprey show to Parliament Hill and had several members of Parliament volunteer to have a lamprey attached to their hand.

With all the horror-show attributes lampreys have going for them, one legend is not true. Lampreys do not travel across land, said Gaden. Although they're capable of sucking their way over and around barriers, they do not leave the water, unlike some species like the snake head, another invasive species in Canada, which can travel across land for short distances.

The video

Birceanu said Sherwood's video shows the males building the nest. She said the males have a ridge along their back that "looks like a vein." They're also more silvery than females.

She said at one point in the video, the female releases her eggs at the same time the male releases his sperm.

"The male and the female are intertwined and they have that quivering behaviour and that's when they're releasing eggs and the males are releasing the sperm," said Birceanu.

Strange Giraffoid Fossil Solves Giraffe Evolutionary Mystery

By CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

JUNE 7, 2022

Intermale-competitions of giraffoid, foreground: Discokeryx xiezhi,

background: Giraffa camelopardalis.

Credit: WANG Yu and GUO Xiaocong

Giraffes are quite distinctive due to their extremely long necks. In fact, their necks can be as long as 7.9 feet (2.4 m). Even though there have been various hypotheses as to the evolutionary origin of these longs necks, they haven’t had sufficient proof, leaving it an unsolved mystery.

Charles Darwin suggested the “competing browsers hypothesis,” which basically says that the elongated necks evolved because they enabled giraffes to reach food that competitors could not. It makes sense, but was this really what happened?

Now, fossils of a strange early giraffoid have revealed the key driving forces in giraffe evolution, according to a study led by researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

The study was published in the journal Science on June 2, 2022.

Modeling of high-speed head-butting in Discokeryx xiezhi using finite element analyses, with (A) and without (B) the complicated joints between cranium and vertebrae, showing the stable (A) or over-bending (B) head-neck articulation. Credit: IVPP

How the giraffe’s long neck evolved has long been an evolutionary mystery. Although there have been different opinions about the process of giraffe neck elongation, scientists never doubted that the impetus for neck elongation was high foliage.

However, as observation of giraffe behavior increased, scientists began to realize that the elegant, long neck of giraffes actually serves as a weapon in male courtship competition and this may be the key to the giraffe evolutionary mystery.

Specifically, giraffes use their two-to-three-meter-long swinging necks to hurl their heavy skulls—equipped with small ossicones and osteomas—against the weak parts of competitors. As a result, the longer the neck, the greater the damage to the opponent.

IVPP researchers and their collaborators conducted their study on Discokeryx xiezhi, a strange early giraffoid. This research contributes to understanding how the giraffe’s long neck evolved as well as to understanding the extensive integration of courtship struggles and feeding pressure. In fact, the neck size of male giraffes is directly related to social hierarchy, and courtship competition is the driving force behind the evolution of long necks.

The fossil community in the Junggar Basin at ~17 million years ago.

Discokeryx xiezhi are in the middle.

Credit: GUO Xiaocong

The fossils in this study were found in early Miocene strata from about 17 million years ago on the northern margin of the Junggar Basin, Xinjiang. A full skull and four cervical vertebrae were part of the find.

“Discokeryx xiezhi featured many unique characteristics among mammals, including the development of a disc-like large ossicone in the middle of its head,” said Prof. DENG Tao from IVPP, a corresponding author of the study. DENG said the single ossicone resembles that of the xiezhi, a one-horned creature from ancient Chinese mythology—thus giving the fossil its name.

According to the researchers, the cervical vertebrae of Discokeryx xiezhi are very stout and have the most complex joints between head and neck and between cervical vertebrae of any mammal. The team demonstrated that the complex articulations between the skull and cervical vertebrae of Discokeryx xiezhi was particularly adapted to high-speed head-to-head impact. They found this structure was far more effective than that of extant animals, such as musk oxen, that are adapted to head impact. In fact, Discokeryx xiezhi may have been the vertebrate best adapted to head impact ever.

“Both living giraffes and Discokeryx xiezhi belong to the Giraffoidea, a superfamily. Although their skull and neck morphologies differ greatly, both are associated with male courtship struggles and both have evolved in an extreme direction,” said WANG Shiqi, first author of the study.

The research team compared the horn morphology of several groups of ruminants, including giraffoids, cattle, sheep, deer and pronghorns. They found that horn diversity in giraffes is much greater than in other groups, with a tendency toward extreme differences in morphology, thus indicating that courtship struggles are more intense and diverse in giraffes than in other ruminants.

The research team further analyzed the ecological environment of Discokeryx xiezhi and the niche it occupied. The Earth was in a warm period and generally densely forested, but the Xinjiang region, where Discokeryx xiezhi lived, was somewhat drier than other areas because the Tibetan Plateau to the south had been rising dramatically, thus blocking the transfer of water vapor.

“Stable isotopes of tooth enamel have indicated that Discokeryx xiezhi was living in open grasslands and may have migrated seasonally,” said MENG Jin, another corresponding author of the study. For animals of the time, the grassland environment was more barren and less comfortable than the forest environment. The violent fighting behavior of Discokeryx xiezhi may have been related to survival-related stress caused by the environment.

At the beginning of the emergence of the genus Giraffa, a similar environment existed. Around seven million years ago, the East African Plateau also changed from a forested environment to open grassland, and the direct ancestors of giraffes had to adapt to new changes. It is possible that, among giraffe ancestors during this period, mating males developed a way of attacking their competitors by swinging their necks and heads. This extreme struggle, supported by sexual selection, thus led to the rapid elongation of the giraffe’s neck over a period of two million years to become the extant genus, Giraffa.

Based on this elongation, Giraffa were well-suited for the niche of feeding on high foliage. However, their ecological status was necessarily less secure than that of bovids and cervids. As a result, Giraffa’s marginal ecological niche may have promoted extreme intraspecific courtship competition, which in turn may have promoted extreme morphological evolution.

Reference: “Sexual selection promotes giraffoid head-neck evolution and ecological adaptation” by Shi-Qi Wang, Jie Ye, Jin Meng, Chunxiao Li, Loïc Costeur, Bastien Mennecart, Chi Zhang, Ji Zhang, Manuela Aiglstorfer, Yang Wang, Yan Wu, Wen-Yu Wu and Tao Deng, 3 June 2022, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abl8316

CREATING QUANTUM REALITY
As the Large Hadron Collider Revs Up, Physicists’ Hopes Soar

The particle collider at CERN will soon restart. “There could be a revolution coming,” scientists say.

Inside the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, a worker uses a bicycle to navigate its 17 miles of tunnels during maintenance in 2020.

Credit...Valentin Flauraud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Dennis Overbye
June 13, 2022

Sign up for Science Times Get stories that capture the wonders of nature, the cosmos and the human body. Get it sent to your inbox.

In April, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva, once again fired up their cosmic gun, the Large Hadron Collider. After a three-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, the collider has resumed shooting protons — the naked guts of hydrogen atoms — around its 17-mile electromagnetic underground racetrack. In early July, the collider will begin crashing these particles together to create sparks of primordial energy.

And so the great game of hunting for the secret of the universe is about to be on again, amid new developments and the refreshed hopes of particle physicists. Even before its renovation, the collider had been producing hints that nature could be hiding something spectacular. Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College London who conducts an experiment at CERN, described data from his previous runs as “the most exciting set of results I’ve seen in my professional lifetime.”

A decade ago, CERN physicists made global headlines with the discovery of the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle, which imparts mass to all the other particles in the universe. What is left to find? Almost everything, optimistic physicists say.

When the CERN collider was first turned on in 2010, the universe was up for grabs. The machine, the biggest and most powerful ever built, was designed to find the Higgs boson. That particle is the keystone of the Standard Model, a set of equations that explains everything scientists have been able to measure about the subatomic world.

But there are deeper questions about the universe that the Standard Model does not explain: Where did the universe come from? Why is it made of matter rather than antimatter? What is the “dark matter” that suffuses the cosmos? How does the Higgs particle itself have mass?

Physicists hoped that some answers would materialize in 2010 when the large collider was first turned on. Nothing showed up except the Higgs — in particular, no new particle that might explain the nature of dark matter. Frustratingly, the Standard Model remained unshaken.

The control room of the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, reopened in April.

Credit...Pierre Albouy/Reuters

The collider was shut down at the end of 2018 for extensive upgrades and repairs. According to the current schedule, the collider will run until 2025 and then shut down for two more years for other extensive upgrades to be installed. Among this set of upgrades are improvements to the giant detectors that sit at the four points where the proton beams collide and analyze the collision debris. Starting in July, those detectors will have their work cut out for them. The proton beams have been squeezed to make them more intense, increasing the chances of protons colliding at the crossing points — but creating confusion for the detectors and computers in the form of multiple sprays of particles that need to be distinguished from one another.

“Data’s going to be coming in at a much faster rate than we’ve been used to,” Dr. Patel said. Where once only a couple of collisions occurred at each beam crossing, now there would be more like five.

“That makes our lives harder in some sense because we’ve got to be able to find the things we’re interested in amongst all those different interactions,” he said. “But it means there’s a bigger probability of seeing the thing you are looking for.”

Meanwhile, a variety of experiments have revealed possible cracks in the Standard Model — and have hinted to a broader, more profound theory of the universe. These results involve rare behaviors of subatomic particles whose names are unfamiliar to most of us in the cosmic bleachers.

Take the muon, a subatomic particle that became briefly famous last year. Muons are often referred to as fat electrons; they have the same negative electrical charge but are 207 times as massive. “Who ordered that?” the physicist Isador Rabi said when muons were discovered in 1936.

Nobody knows where muons fit in the grand scheme of things. They are created by cosmic ray collisions — and in collider events — and they decay radioactively in microseconds into a fizz of electrons and the ghostly particles called neutrinos.

Last year, a team of some 200 physicists associated with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois reported that muons spinning in a magnetic field had wobbled significantly faster than predicted by the Standard Model.

The discrepancy with theoretical predictions came in the eighth decimal place of the value of a parameter called g-2, which described how the particle responds to a magnetic field.

Scientists ascribed the fractional but real difference to the quantum whisper of as-yet-unknown particles that would materialize briefly around the muon and would affect its properties. Confirming the existence of the particles would, at last, break the Standard Model.

The Fermilab accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Fermilab’s Tevatron was the world’s most powerful collider until the Large Hadron Collider was built.

Credit...U.S. Department of Energy

But two groups of theorists are still working to reconcile their predictions of what g-2 should be, while they wait for more data from the Fermilab experiment.

“The g-2 anomaly is still very much alive,” said Aida X. El-Khadra, a physicist at the University of Illinois who helped lead a three-year effort called the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative to establish a consensus prediction. “Personally, I am optimistic that the cracks in the Standard Model will add up to an earthquake. However, the exact position of the cracks may still be a moving target.”

The muon also figures in another anomaly. The main character, or perhaps villain, in this drama is a particle called a B quark, one of six varieties of quark that compose heavier particles like protons and neutrons. B stands for bottom or, perhaps, beauty. Such quarks occur in two-quark particles known as B mesons. But these quarks are unstable and are prone to fall apart in ways that appear to violate the Standard Model.

Some rare decays of a B quark involve a daisy chain of reactions, ending in a different, lighter kind of quark and a pair of lightweight particles called leptons, either electrons or their plump cousins, muons. The Standard Model holds that electrons and muons are equally likely to appear in this reaction. (There is a third, heavier lepton called the tau, but it decays too fast to be observed.) But Dr. Patel and his colleagues have found more electron pairs than muon pairs, violating a principle called lepton universality.

“This could be a Standard Model killer,” said Dr. Patel, whose team has been investigating the B quarks with one of the Large Hadron Collider’s big detectors, LHCb. This anomaly, like the muon’s magnetic anomaly, hints at an unknown “influencer” — a particle or force interfering with the reaction.

One of the most dramatic possibilities, if this data holds up in the upcoming collider run, Dr. Patel says, is a subatomic speculation called a leptoquark. If the particle exists, it could bridge the gap between two classes of particle that make up the material universe: lightweight leptons — electrons, muons and also neutrinos — and heavier particles like protons and neutrons, which are made of quarks. Tantalizingly, there are six kinds of quarks and six kinds of leptons.

“We are going into this run with more optimism that there could be a revolution coming,” Dr. Patel said. “Fingers crossed.”

There is yet another particle in this zoo behaving strangely: the W boson, which conveys the so-called weak force responsible for radioactive decay. In May, physicists with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or C.D.F., reported on a 10-year effort to measure the mass of this particle, based on some 4 million W bosons harvested from collisions in Fermilab’s Tevatron, which was the world’s most powerful collider until the Large Hadron Collider was built.

Paolo Girotti, a scientist at Fermilab, adjusting instruments with the Muon g-2 experiment in 2017.

Credit...Reidar Hahn/U.S. Department of Energy

According to the Standard Model and previous mass measurements, the W boson should weigh about 80.357 billion electron volts, the unit of mass-energy favored by physicists. By comparison the Higgs boson weighs 125 billion electron volts, about as much as an iodine atom. But the C.D.F. measurement of the W, the most precise ever done, came in higher than predicted at 80.433 billion. The experimenters calculated that there was only one chance in 2 trillion — 7-sigma, in physics jargon — that this discrepancy was a statistical fluke.

The mass of the W boson is connected to the masses of other particles, including the infamous Higgs. So this new discrepancy, if it holds up, could be another crack in the Standard Model.

Still, all three anomalies and theorists’ hopes for a revolution could evaporate with more data. But to optimists, all three point in the same encouraging direction toward hidden particles or forces interfering with “known” physics.

“So a new particle that might explain both g-2 and the W mass might be within reach at the L.H.C.,” said Kyle Cranmer, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who works on other experiments at CERN.

John Ellis, a theoretician at CERN and Kings College London, noted that at least 70 papers have been published suggesting explanations for the new W-mass discrepancy.

“Many of these explanations also require new particles that may be accessible to the L.H.C.,” he said. “Did I mention dark matter? So, plenty of things to watch out for!”

Of the upcoming run Dr. Patel said: “It’ll be exciting. It’ll be hard work, but we are really keen to see what we’ve got and whether there is something genuinely exciting in the data.”

He added: “You could go through a scientific career and not be able to say that once. So it feels like a privilege.”

Dennis Overbye joined The Times in 1998, and has been a reporter since 2001. He has written two books: “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe” and “Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance.” @overbye
A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2022, Section D, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Hopes Soar as Collider Revs Up.

SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for QUANTUM

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for QUANTUM REALITY

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for QUANTUM UNIVERSE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for GODEL

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Dark Matter or Ether

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CERN

Could steam-powered cars decrease the CO2 in the atmosphere?

President William Howard Taft and his wife rode in this steam-powered automobile in 1909.

AP Photo

THE CONVERSATION
Published: June 13, 2022

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Could steam-powered cars decrease the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere? –

Emma, age 16, Springville, Utah

With the growing severity and frequency of storms, heat waves and wildfires, and the other dangers from climate change, there are many reasons to be concerned about the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists have shown that humanity’s addiction to burning fossil fuels is causing this problem, which means it’s time to kick that habit.

Because transportation generates more than one-fourth of the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels, slashing CO2 emissions requires phasing out vehicles powered by gasoline, diesel and natural gas.

Steam powered many of the early automobiles sold around 1900. Could the same technology play a role again?

The ‘Stanley Steamer’

The steam-powered car became possible once gasoline and diesel oil replaced wood and coal for the powering of engines.

Inventors Francis and Freelan Stanley, twin brothers, became automaking pioneers after they improved photographic technology. In 1898 and 1899 they were selling more vehicles than any other early automaker, and their steam-powered “Rocket Racer” set a speed record in 1906.

All along, cars powered by internal combustion engines – the kind most in use today – were competing with steam cars and winning the technology war. Starting in 1912, electric starters made them safer and more convenient by replacing dangerous hand cranks. By 1920, when its assembly lines started producing the Model T with an electric starter, Ford was selling hundreds of thousands of cars per year.

In contrast, early steam cars were heavy and expensive, and it took a long time to make enough steam to get them rolling. Doble Steam Motors, another early automaker, eventually solved this last problem and many others, but the cars remained pricey, and it was too late: The noisy and polluting but much cheaper internal combustion engine had won out. The Stanley Motor Carriage Co. ceased operating in 1924.

To be clear, because the heat to boil water to make steam has to come from somewhere, these steam-powered vehicles burned fossil fuels to heat their water anyway.

Twins and automobile manufacturers Freelan and Francis Stanley go for a ride in an early Stanley Steamer in 1897. PhotoQuest/Getty Images

A 1970s comeback

Steam power had something of a comeback in the 1970s, but not because of climate concerns. Back then, air pollution spewed by vehicles had become a serious problem filling cities with smog.

Steam boilers can burn fuel more thoroughly than a standard internal combustion engine, leading to cleaner exhaust that is mostly water and carbon dioxide.

At the time, that was seen as an improvement.

Some of the cities battling pollution from automobile exhaust added steam-powered buses to their fleets. This resurgence was short-lived because of the arrival of new technologies that could curb pollution from internal combustion engines.

This experimental steam-powered bus was rolled out in in 1972.

Frank Lodge/National Archives at College Park via Wikimedia Commons

Steam’s drawback and electricity’s advantages

The biggest obstacle for steam-powered vehicles is that steam isn’t a source of energy. Rather, it is a source of power for the wheels.

While getting around in steam-powered vehicles might make the air cleaner in the drivers’ own communities, switching to steam-powered engines that continue to burn gasoline and diesel wouldn’t reduce CO2 emissions.

A different approach can potentially eliminate the need to burn fossil fuels for transportation: replacing gasoline tanks with batteries to provide the energy, along with swapping out internal combustion engines for electric motors to turn the wheels.

The reduction in carbon emissions will be far greater if vehicles run on electricity generated by wind turbines, solar panels or other energy sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide.

School buses are beginning to run on electricity instead of fossil fuels.

AP Photo/Business Wire

As it happens, some of the first cars ever made were electric. Manufacturers stopped making those models because the need to recharge their batteries after short distances rendered those vehicles less convenient than those powered by fossil fuels.

Battery technology is so much better now that some electric vehicles can travel 400 miles (640 kilometers) without needing to recharge. Instead of switching to steam as a source of power to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions, we recommend electricity generated from renewable sources.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Authors

Brian Stewart
Professor of Physics, Wesleyan University

Gary W. Yohe
Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University
Disclosure statement

China’s ‘Particle Beam Cannon’ Is a Nuclear-Power Breakthrough

It promises to recycle spent nuclear fuel, making it cheaper and less dangerous—and moving Beijing toward energy independence.

This is not China's new particle accelerator, of which images do not seem to be publicly available. It is the DESY HERA particle accelerator at Hamburg, Germany. SIMONWALDHER

By THOMAS CORBETT and PETER W. SINGER
JUNE 13, 2022

The prototype “particle beam cannon” recently completed by Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Modern Physics may sound like science fiction, but it is a novel new technology that promises to recycle dangerous waste produced by a nuclear reactor. A product of China’s huge investment in advanced nuclear-energy systems, the breakthrough could move the country toward energy independence and further cement its global leadership in climate-friendly technology.

In a typical fission reactor, atoms of heavy isotopes such as uranium-235 are broken apart, releasing energy. The process also releases extra neutrons, which collide with other atoms and break them apart in a chain reaction. The broken atoms are spent fuel that is cooled for a few years and then carefully stored for a few centuries. But a proposed new type of reactor built with this “cannon”—formally, a proton accelerator—could recycle this spent fuel, making it cheaper and safer to generate electricity.

As envisioned, an accelerator-driven system, or ADS, consists of three parts: the proton accelerator launches protons, the spallation target contains the heavy element to be split, and the sub-critical reactor contains the fuel which causes fission. The accelerator fires protons at a heavy element (most likely bismuth) surrounded by a blanket of spent fuel and fresh fissile material (most likely thorium-232 or uranium-238). The target splits apart, releasing neutrons that are absorbed by the spent fuel, turning it back into fissile heavy isotopes—that is, fresh nuclear fuel. Importantly, this process is self-terminating, and does not run the risk of a chain reaction or a meltdown. The Institute of Modern Physics’ completion of a prototype accelerator is a big step toward a working ADS, and a prime example of China’s huge investment in advanced nuclear energy systems paying dividends in new innovations.

Unlike numerous governments that have abandoned nuclear energy entirely, China sees fission as key to a more secure future. Nuclear power is more efficient than wind or solar, and unlike fossil fuels, it does not emit greenhouse gases and particulate air pollution. Ranked second in the world for daily oil consumption, China’s inexorable demand for ever more energy places it in a precarious position. Upwards of 70% of China’s petroleum comes from imports, primarily from the Middle East, and must transit numerous maritime chokepoints. China is slated to spend $440 billion between now and 2035 to build at least 150 more nuclear reactors. If China can continue to develop ADS technology, the waste from these plants can be put to good use and be recycled to produce even more energy for its growing needs.

Beijing is also aiming to reduce the possibility of radiological leaks and uncontrolled chain reactions by developing new and inherently safer systems. While the Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear disasters are the most famous examples of what can go wrong, China too faced its own issues in June of 2021 when the Taishan nuclear power plant in Guangdong Province had a possible radiation leak from failed fuel rods. China plans to spend nearly $10 billion on a new generation of ocean-bound floating nuclear power plants, while also exploring nuclear fusion as a safer alternative to fission.

China is outspending the United States in the nuclear sphere. Since 2009, the Department of Energy has awarded less than $900 million to improve nuclear infrastructure and resilience. It was major news, by the standards of the U.S. nuclear community, when the DOE announced an additional $48.8 million for the Nuclear Energy University Program, including $24 million for fuel-cycle research and development. There may be additional money for nuclear projects in the DOE’s $20 billion Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, intended to innovate new energy sources.

Currently, two new plants are being built in the United States, the Vogtle Units 3 & 4 near Waynesboro, Georgia, while another, the NuScale reactor, is still in the planning phase. Before this, the most recent nuclear plants in the United States opened in 1996 and 2016, respectively. At the same time, 21 nuclear reactors are currently being decommissioned in the United States. Although improving technology has kept nuclear energy’s share of the country’s electricity at around 20 percent, the current outlook for the U.S. 2050 energy portfolio shows a marked decline in nuclear’s share.

China’s work on its particle-beam accelerator and ADS is of importance to the country’s industry, its energy strategy, and its global leadership in a wider range of issues, from technology to climate change. If the United States continues to invest in innovation, such new options and techniques may become viable for it as well. Most experts agree that advanced sources of nuclear energy enabled by approaches like ADS are far safer than their predecessors and could prove critical to the world meeting its climate goals in the coming decades. While China is certainly racing towards a goal of energy leadership, that doesn’t mean it is the only one that can benefit.

Thomas Corbett is a research analyst with BluePath Labs. His areas of focus include Chinese foreign relations, emerging technology, and international economics. 

P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America.

French Left Pitches for Economic Revamp in Parliament Election

Ania Nussbaum, Bloomberg News

Francois Villeroy de Galhau Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- President Emmanuel Macron’s setback in the first round of legislative elections will force him to contend with an emboldened leftist opposition united around a key objective: to undo his pro-business agenda.

Maintaining a majority of at least 289 lawmakers in the National Assembly has become tougher for Macron, with polls showing he’s on track to get 262 to 301 seats Sunday’s second-round vote. The left-wing grouping known as Nupes led by Jean-Luc Melenchon is projected to come second with 164 to 208 seats.

Though Macron’s party will still be the biggest bloc, governing with a relative majority would contrast to the last five years when lawmaking was straightforward. The president will likely be forced to strike alliances with other parties.

And even if Nupes, which includes communists, greens and socialists, probably won’t be able to implement much of its program, it will set to out to disrupt Macron’s plans with referendums, filibustering and parliamentary investigations.

Here are the other key points of Nupes’ economic program:

Massive increase in public spending

Nupes wants to increase public spending by 250 billion euros ($261 billion) a year — equivalent to about 11% of gross domestic product — to help poorer households and invest in public services and the green transition. It says new expenditures will be funded by higher taxes on financial transactions, big corporations, and the rich.

It’s also betting on new revenues and boosted consumer spending from job creation, with 1.5 million new posts in the public sector. In total, it expects 267 billion euros in new income, which would bring public debt to 120% of GDP in 2027 (compared with 112% currently).

Yet there’s debate over how much more growth the program will actually bring, with the center-left think tank Terra Nova questioning the impact on the “credibility and sustainability” of public debt.

Debt and the ECB

Nupes sees interest rates on French debt rising slightly if they were to implement their program, but is counting on help from the European Central Bank. According to their program, they could get the ECB to transform its holdings from asset purchase programs into perpetual debt with zero interest as well as buying more. They’d also carry out an audit to determine a share of public debt that is “illegitimate.”

Those plans have also met with criticism. In a radio interview last week, Bank of France Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau warned the central bank can’t cancel debt as its against the founding treaties of the euro. “You can’t count on the ECB to buy more French debt,” Villeroy told BFM Business TV. “It wouldn’t do it, notably to not drive inflation, which is the main concern of French people.”

Retirement at 60

Currently, the French retire at age 67, with full pensions regardless of how long they’ve worked. They have the option of retiring earlier, from 62 years old, but payments depend on careers and age. There are different regimes, but most people born after 1973 must have worked for 43 years.

Nupes wants people who’ve worked at least 40 years to be able to retired at age 60. It estimates this would cost 70 billion euros annually.

According to Macron’s campaign proposal, the French could retire from 65, but his team has said that there would be exceptions.

Blocking prices

Nupes plans to freeze the prices of essential goods, including gas and electricity, five seasonal fruits and vegetables, and hygiene products. It would require big energy players to lower their margins and sell gas at a lower, regulated price. The alliance says it wants to negotiate an EU-wide wholesale gas price. Rents would be capped.

Nationalizations

Nupes aims to nationalize what it calls “strategic airports,” highways and lottery games operator Francaise des Jeux, which was privatized by Macron.

Banking and trading reforms

Nupes say it would split retail banking from investment operations, and force banks to divert funds to the green transition and smaller companies.

A new tax on financial transactions would be “significant.” Toxic and “useless” financial products would be banned, while leveraged buyouts would only be allowed when employees purchase their own companies. Shareholders rights’ would be tied to their seniority as investors.

Fewer dividends

The alliance wants to ban layoffs at companies that receive public subsidies or pay dividends, and give employees a say on payout policies. The goal, according to Nupes, is for sums that go into dividends and share buybacks to equal spending on wage increases.

Increasing the minimum wage

Melenchon’s alliance wants to boost the minimum wage to 1,500 euros a month after taxes, compared with roughly 1,300 euros currently, and increase the salary of civil servants.

More days off

The group says it will bring annual paid leave to six weeks, from five, and impose higher wages for overtime work.

More investment in green transition

Nupes wants to invest 40 billion euros a year to tackle climate change, focusing on energy, transport, industry and house. It says that will lead to the creation of 850,000 jobs in the private sector.

Benchmark: Here’s what Goldman got wrong about lithium prices
Frik Els | June 9, 2022 |

A hard rain is unlikely to fall. Rongda Lithium’s mine site in Sichuan.

At the end of May, Goldman Sachs rattled lithium stocks after the investment bank declared the battery metals bull market “over for now”.

Goldman called today’s lithium levels a “fundamental mispricing [that] has in turn generated an outsized supply response well ahead of the demand trend.”

Goldman predicted an average around $55,000 a tonne for this year, but its forecast for 2023 was particularly eye-raising – a very precise $16,372 a tonne.

The widely quoted report prompted a sell-off in lithium stocks, with heavy losses across the board. Many in the sector are still down by double digit percentage points since the report, damaged further by general market weakness.

In a new note, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a battery supply chain and price reporting agency, responded to Goldman’s central thesis that the lithium market is ready to “pivot towards a prolonged phase of surplus starting this year.”

Benchmark outlines five reasons why it feels the call was wrong:

The low quality of China’s hard rock and brine resources means the industry cannot rely on feedstock from the country to meet market demand;

“Capacity does not equal supply” with the example of Tianqi Lithium’s Kwinana refinery in Western Australia a case in point with a decade long path from announcement to full production (now targeted for 2025);

New lithium supply comes at a higher cost base as deposits with unconventional mineralogy, lower grades, and higher strip ratios are developed and new, often smaller, converters struggle to keep costs down;

“There is no single lithium price” – a large portion of the market is under long term fixed and variable price contracts, meaning it will take time for spot and contract prices to converge;

A significant portion of chemical capacity is being used to reprocess material that does not meet downstream specifications – this “merely represents lower efficiency production rather than the introduction of new lithium units to market.”

Benchmark expects the market will remain in structural shortage until 2025 and expects changes to pricing mechanisms and increasing contract deals:

“As the market wrestles between long-term supply security to fuel the lithium ion economy, and increasingly market-led pricing mechanisms to incentivise supply growth, the era of lithium market volatility is likely just beginning.”

Click here for the full note at Benchmark.

Anglo American takes on an industry-first sustainability-linked loan
Henry Lazenby | June 9, 2022 |

Greenside Colliery in South Africa. (Image courtesy of Anglo American.)

Anglo American (LSE: AAL) has agreed to a $100 million, 10-year loan from the International Finance Corporation in what is understood to be the mining industry’s first known sustainability-linked financing focusing exclusively on social development indicators.

Anglo American will use the funding to build its so-called Sustainable Mining Plan further. The initiative aims to support community development in rural communities close to Anglo American’s South Africa-based mining operations. The project is expected to generate jobs and improve the quality of education for more than 73,000 students.

Anglo American’s Sustainable Mining Plan includes targets to support schools in our host communities to perform within the top 30 percent of state schools nationally and to create or support three offsite jobs for every onsite job at its operations by 2025.

“Sustainability-linked financing is a powerful tool for mobilizing capital and incentivizing companies that seek to contribute to a more sustainable future,” said IFC director for South Africa and Nigeria, Kevin Njiraini, in a press release.

Gold Fields investor tells miner to scrap Yamana deal

Reuters | June 10, 2022 |

Image from Yamana Gold.

A top-10 investor in South Africa’s Gold Fields on Friday urged the miner to cancel its planned takeover of Canada-based Yamana Gold, saying the $6.7 billion transaction was expensive and did not guarantee growth and profitability.

Shares in the South African miner plunged 20% on May 31, when it announced the all-share transaction that would make it a top four global gold producer, amid concerns over valuation and shareholder dilution. The stock has not recovered since.

Redwheel, which holds 3.38% of Gold Fields, on Friday became the first major investor to publicly call for the deal to be scrapped, saying the share price decline showed that the market believed the miner had made a “serious error” in pursuing Yamana.

“Redwheel has been a significant investor in Goldfields for several years and we believe that the company should withdraw the offer and concentrate on the excellent organic growth options which it already owns,” it said in an open letter to Gold Fields’ board published on its website.

While the market reaction to the deal has been mostly negative, some analysts believe Gold Fields could benefit from expanding its size and geographical diversification, ahead of the next gold price rally.

“Gold Fields has been unduly punished by the market. They are leaders of disciplined growth in LatAm, hence a bigger platform in the region provides an expanded base for real value creation with a Tier 1 asset in Canada to boot,” Christopher Kololian, RBC’s Co-Head of EMEA Mining & Metals, said.

(By Nelson Banya and Clara Denina; Editing by Helen Reid and Elaine Hardcastle)

Gold mines in lawless region targeted in Chad’s revenue search

Bloomberg News | June 10, 2022

Refugee camp in Chad. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Chad’s looking to reassert control over its gold reserves, a longtime source of conflict and smuggling, following an upsurge of deadly clashes in mining regions.

The landlocked Central African country’s interim leader, Colonel Mahamat Idriss Deby, wants to profit from gold mined in the far north, a largely stateless region controlled by armed militias. Chad is currently facing a food-security crisis and struggling to reach a deal with external creditors including commodity trading giant Glencore Plc to restructure $2.8 billion of external debt.

Gold worth 57 billion CFA francs ($91 million) leaves Chad each week heading for Libya, Deby told state broadcaster Tele Tchad in an interview aired on June 9.

“That’s enormous and it needs to stop,” Deby said during a visit to Kouri Bougoudi, a northern town where at least 100 small-scale miners died in clashes over access to gold last month.

Deby’s estimate of the value of gold smuggled out of the country dwarfs Chad’s official gold exports, which amounted to about $200 million in 2020, according to World Bank Data.

Gold mining in the tri-border area between Chad, Libya and Niger has long posed a security challenge to the administration in the capital, N’Djamena.

In early 2021, Libya-based rebels used the border region to launch an assault to overthrow Deby’s father, longtime leader General Idriss Deby. The repressive ruler was killed during a visit to the frontline on April 20, according to interim authorities.

Chad is still reeling from the impact of Deby’s death, while struggling with the global economic shock caused by the coronavirus pandemic, climate change and regional instability.

A restructuring of its external debt under the G20 Common Framework that would free up much-needed resources — including oil revenue — has stalled as Chad and its creditors have failed to agree on the terms.

Deby on Thursday vowed to ensure that Chadians would benefit from the gold mines in Kouri Bougoudi.

“We will put in place mining services, tax authorities and customs. Foreigners who want to mine here will need a permit to do so,” Deby said. “The state will get its part, while the province will be entitled to 5% of revenue from its natural resources.”

He denied the evacuation of small-scale miners by security forces was an attempt by authorities to hand over the mines to foreign actors. Previous attempts to industrialize Chad’s gold reserves have failed due to insecurity and the lack of infrastructure in the remote region, according to a recent report by the RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses.

(By Katarina Hoije)

In Bolivia’s Amazon, wildcat gold mining boom stokes tension over environment

Reuters | June 10, 2022 |

Through the years, miners have devastated an area of the Peruvian Amazon that’s almost five times the size of Manhattan. (Image from archives)

In Bolivia’s Amazon tensions are rising over a boom in wildcat gold mining that is driving a surge in imports of mercury used to extract the precious metal and is sparking conflict between small-scale prospectors and local indigenous groups.

The landlocked South American nation has seen gold production spike in the last five years, with an important amount of that coming from artisanal miners, officials say. That has risen with the global gold price elevated in recent years.

Officials and indigenous leaders are now worried about how the mining is impacting the local environment and waterways, and encroaching on indigenous lands as has happened in the Amazon in Peru and Brazil, with miners increasingly emboldened.

“We’ve been received with firecrackers and dynamite, they’ve thrown stones at us,” Bolivian Senator Cecilia Requena told Reuters during a trip to a tiny hamlet along the Beni River in the country’s north, a hot spot for illegal gold mining.

During the trip in May Reuters saw signs everywhere along the river of mining machinery and heard explosions from mining operations. Requena showed Reuters a video of one recent visit when her boat had been attacked by a man throwing rocks.

“You’ve been warned haven’t you?,” the man yelled.

The rise in wildcat mining has seen Bolivia, a country of some 12 million people, become the world’s top importer of mercury since 2019, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), which tracks global trade flows.

Mercury is key to wildcat gold mining and experts say its growth is a reflection of how the industry has boomed.

“Small scale mining activity and the use of mercury in the country has increased,” Marcos Orellana, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, told Reuters.

“The use of mercury in gold mining has severe impacts on environmental protection, deforestation and especially on the rights of indigenous peoples,” he explained, adding it contaminated waters used for washing and fishing.

Bolivia’s mining ministry did not respond to requests for comment by Reuters for this story.

“We truly are totally polluted here,” said Isidro Flores, a leader of the Correo indigenous community that lives next to the river. “You can’t even take a bath or drink. We used to fish in the river and now we can’t, everything is polluted.”

Requena, a centrist lawmaker, has become a vocal activist trying to set rules to curb wildcat mining in Bolivia’s Amazon.

“We’ve received signals that we are being threatened,” Requena said. “People say they have the right to carry out mining and nobody can take that away from them. They say they will fight and use violence if necessary.”

(By Segio Limachi, Marcelo Rochabrun and Monica Machicao; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Diane Craft)