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)
Saturday, March 04, 2023
Volkswagen board discusses two new North America plants at meeting
Volkswagen’s supervisory board will on Friday discuss plans for two new factories in North America, one production plant and one battery cell factory, two people familiar with the matter said.
While the committee is expected to approve a site for its Scout brand in the United States, discussions around a gigafactory are open-ended, the sources said. Other issues on the meeting’s agenda are Volkswagen’s annual results and its dividend, the people said.
A person familiar with the matter earlier this week said the supervisory board would discuss a new plant for the Scout brand, which is a key part of Volkswagen’s target to gain 10% market share in the United States.
Separately, Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume in December said the carmaker had begun searching for a site for a battery cell factory in North America, adding Canada was “one logical option” due to its raw material resources.
“We are still working hard to find a suitable location for our first gigafactory in North America and are in good, constructive talks,” a Volkswagen spokesperson said on Friday, adding no decision has been made yet.
(By Jan Schwartz and Christoph Steitz; Editing by Miranda Murray and Matthias Williams)
The world of ethical debt has reached the high-street jewelry market. Denmark’s Pandora A/S offered a sustainability-linked bond that includes a target to use 100% recycled silver and gold by 2025.
The jewelry maker on Friday sold a debut €500 million ($531 million) sustainability-linked bond with a five-year maturity, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak about it.
The deal includes three sustainability performance targets, with the first two focused on reduction of emissions while the third specifies total use of recycled gold and silver within two years. The sharp growth of such SLB sales has slowed in the past year as companies face scrutiny over greenwashing and whether targets are too easy.
Pandora’s offering was part of efforts to ease its reliance on the bank loan market and to diversify funding sources. The company has reached “the size and strength” where it’s “natural” to get a rating and to have more sources of financing than just loans, the company’s Chief Financial Officer Anders Boyer said in an interview this week.
Proceeds from the sale will be used for general corporate purposes, including refinancing of existing debt, involving a bridge facility by some of the bookrunners, according to the person. The spread over mid-swaps on the notes tightened around 30 basis points between initial price talk and final terms and investor orders reached around €2.1 billion. The deal was managed by Danske Bank A/S, Nordea Bank Abp, BNP Paribas SA and Morgan Stanley.
Pandora is expanding, having pledged to open at least 100 new stores in 2023. Its stock is up almost 36% year-to-date on the back of strong earnings and plans to buy back shares.
(By Colin Keatinge and Leo Laikola, with assistance from Lisa Pham)
An international team of researchers has proven that steel tools were already used in Europe around 2,900 years ago.
Using geochemical analyses, the scientists were able to prove that stone stelae on the Iberian peninsula that date back to the Final Bronze Age feature complex engravings that could only have been done using tempered steel.
Their findings were backed up by metallographic analyses of an iron chisel from the same period and region (Rocha do Vigio, Portugal, ca. 900 BCE) that showed the necessary carbon content to be proper steel. The result was also confirmed experimentally by undertaking trials with chisels made of various materials: Only the chisel made of tempered steel was suitably capable of engraving the stone.
Until recently it was assumed that it had not been possible to produce suitable quality steel in the Early Iron Age and certainly not in the Final Bronze Age and that it only came to be widespread in Europe under the Roman Empire.
“The chisel from Rocha do Vigio and the context where it was found show that iron metallurgy, including the production and tempering of steel, was probably an indigenous development of decentralized, small communities in Iberia, and not due to the influence of later colonization processes,” lead researcher Ralph Araque Gonzalez said in a media statement. “This also has consequences for the archaeological assessment of iron metallurgy and quartzite sculptures in other regions of the world.”
Metallographic analyses of an iron chisel from the Final Bronze Age in the Iberian peninsula showed the necessary carbon content to be proper steel. (Image by Rafael Ferreiro Mählmann (A), Bastian Asmus (B), Ralph Araque Gonzalez (C-E). Courtesy of the University of Freiburg).
According to Araque Gonzalez, the archaeological record of Late Bronze Age Iberia (c. 1300-800 BCE) is fragmentary in many parts of the Iberian Peninsula: Sparse remains of the settlement and nearly no detectable burials are complemented by traces of metal hoarding and remains of mining activities. Taking this into account, the western Iberian stelae with their depictions of anthropomorphic figures, animals and selected objects are of unique importance for the investigation of this era.
Until now, studies of the actual rocks from which these stelae were made to gain insights into using materials and tools have been the exception. Araque Gonzalez and his colleagues analyzed the geological composition of the stelae in depth. This led them to discover that a significant number of stelae were not as had been assumed made of quartzite, but silicate quartz sandstone.
“Just like quartzite, this is an extremely hard rock that cannot be worked with bronze or stone tools, but only with tempered steel,” the archaeologist said.
Analyses of an iron chisel found in Rocha do Vigio showed that Iberian stonemasons from the Final Bronze Age had the necessary tools. The researchers discovered that it consisted of heterogeneous yet astonishingly carbon-rich steel.
To confirm their findings, they also carried out an experiment involving a professional stonemason, a blacksmith and a bronze caster, and attempted to work the rock that the pillars were made of using chisels of different materials. The stonemason could not work the stone with either the stone or the bronze chisels, or even using an iron chisel with an untempered point.
“The people of the Final Bronze Age in Iberia were capable of tempering steel. Otherwise, they would not have been able to work the pillars,” Araque Gonzalez pointed out.
Ontario government introduces Building More Mines Act
Staff Writer | March 2, 2023 | Ontario Legislative Building in Toronto. Stock image.
The government of Canada’s Ontario province has introduced legislation to amend the Mining Act that will, if passed, attract more investment in the province’s mining sector while strengthening the province’s critical minerals supply chains for batteries and electric vehicles.
In 2021, Ontario produced over C$11.1 billion ($8.1bn) worth of minerals, accounting for 20% of Canada’s total mineral production and approximately C$3.1 billion ($2.2bn) worth of critical minerals.
The Ontario government released its Critical Minerals Strategy last year, a five-year plan that includes addressing regulatory challenges to get mines built more efficiently.
If passed, the Building More Mines Act, 2023 could advance critical minerals projects by making it easier for companies to get a permit to recover minerals from mine tailings and waste; improve closure planning by having more qualified professionals available to certify plans; allow more flexibility in the techniques used to rehabilitate mines once they are closed and create more options for companies to pay financial assurance.
“It shouldn’t take 15 years to open a mine. This process is too time consuming and costly, leading to project delays and lost opportunities for Ontario’s mineral exploration and mining sector,” George Pirie, Minister of Mines said in the statement.
“We need to get building. That’s why our government is introducing changes to the Mining Act to help attract more investment and secure the critical minerals that support the made-in-Ontario supply chain for new technologies like batteries and electric vehicles.”
These changes, the government said, would benefit the entire minerals sector and advance Ontario’s plan to build an integrated supply chain by connecting mineral producers in the north, including those in the Ring of Fire, with the manufacturing sector in the south.
Ontario’s Ring of Fire region has multi-generational potential for critical minerals production including chromite, nickel, copper and platinum needed for clean steel and electric vehicle manufacturing.
The modifications to the Mining Act would increase certainty for business planning and generate investment in Northern Ontario to provide significant economic development opportunities for northern and Indigenous communities.
All amendments, it said, will maintain standards for environmental protection and meet the duty to consult with Indigenous communities.
The proposed package of legislative amendments is posted on the Environmental Registry of Ontario and is open for public comment until April 16.
New Tesla motor technology could disrupt rare earths industry
Staff Writer | March 3, 2023 | Future electric vehicles may use less in rare earth elements, but when exactly isn’t clear.
Rare earth element companies may face pressure after Tesla unveiled plans this week to develop car motors without key critical minerals.
In North America, California-focused MP Materials (NYSE: MP) and Colorado-based Energy Fuels (TSX: EFR; NYSE: UUUU) are the main producers as the West tries to challenge China’s dominance in the production of rare earth elements such as neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr), erbium and dysprosium. NdPr is used in the magnets of electric vehicle (EV) motors.
But Tesla said Wednesday a future generation of autos won’t need the element, though it didn’t provide details of the proposed technology, when it would hit the market and how widely it would be used. Analysts at Bank of America Global Research said current producers would still have a market.
“Any transition to new technology will likely take a significant amount of time and it is unclear if this will be adopted in all Tesla models or by other EV producers,” Bank of America said in the report released Thursday.
“While we do acknowledge the downside risks posed by current or future technological developments, the strong long-term growth outlook for permanent magnet use in EV’s/wind turbines, expected to grow two to three times by 2035, suggest there may be enough room for multiple technologies to co-exist.”
Western governments have poured billions of dollars into critical minerals strategies in recent years, investing in companies and projects at the forefront of the transition to green technology roused by concerns over global warming. They want to secure sources for metals like copper, cobalt, nickel and rare earths used in most modern technologies from cell phones to defence. Analysts say China controls about 80% of the rare earths market.
Project updates
MP Materials agreed last month to supply Tokyo-based magnet-maker Sumitomo with NdPr from its Mountain Pass mine in California after refining by companies in Vietnam and the Philippines instead of in China as it used to. Energy Fuels, which has development projects and plants across the US southwest, expanded this month to Brazil with the $22 million purchase of a rare earths project in Bahia state.
NioCorp Developments (TSX: NB) said last month it produced a high-purity mixed concentrate of rare earth elements from its demonstration plant in Trois-Rivieres, Que. It is preparing for the $1.2 billion development of its Elk Creek critical minerals project in southeast Nebraska.
Australia-based Vital Metals (ASX: VML) wants to finish an initial economic assessment by June of its Nechalacho project 110 kilometres southeast of Yellowknife, NWT. It’s advancing a C$55 million processing plan in Saskatoon, Sask. although its off-take partner in Norway isn’t expected to be ready until next year. Space rock power
Shares in rare earths producers and developers were mostly up on Friday as the wider stock markets gained on data showing the United States services sector grew last month and expectations of a rebound in China.
Some producers recovered after falls on the news from Tesla’s investor day. Bank of America said the sell-off was overdone and noted automakers have been trying to design motors without rare earths for years.
In 2018, Toyota developed a new magnet but couldn’t eliminate NdPr and said it would continue to work on it for at least a decade.
“This highlights the time it takes to transition to a new technology,” Bank of America said. “There could be some other efforts on the material sciences front which could eventually pose downside risk to the use of NdPr-based magnets. Either way, these developments tend to have long development lead-times.”
The analysts also noted a potential far-out solution in research on space rocks being done by Northeastern University in Boston and Cambridge University in the UK. The plan is to synthesize tetrataenite, an iron-nickel alloy found in meteorites, to replace rare earths.
“Researchers postulated a method through which they could artificially make tetrataenite, a cosmic magnet that takes millions of years to develop naturally,” Bank of America said. “However, the researchers also mentioned that more work is needed to determine whether it will be suitable for high-performance magnets and if it can be commercially produced at scale.”
First Quantum losing $8 million a day on Cobre Panama halt
Canada’s First Quantum Minerals (TSX: FM) says it’s experiencing losses of up to $8 million a day due to the suspension of ore processing and port loading affecting its giant copper mine in Panama.
In a letter sent this week to the country’s Maritime Authority (AMP), the chief executive of First Quantum’s local unit, Minera Panama, said the halt ordered last week has had a domino effect.
CEO Alan Delaney warned the longer activities are suspended, the greater the “exponential and irreparable damage to the company and stakeholders, including the workforce.”
He noted the government’s measure, which adds to a previous directive to suspend loading operations at the mine’s Punta Rincón port, had forced the company to kicked off a process to suspend contracts for over 4,000 workers, as required by Panamanian labour laws.
The executive noted that move was due to the fact the company has no way of determining how long AMP will prevent the company from exporting and processing ore.
The petition was rejected Thursday evening, according to local press, with the authority saying that any suspension of employment contracts while a company is engaged in negotiations must have prior judicial authorization.
Negotiations between the Toronto-based miner and the country’s government over a new contract for the mine turned sour in December, when the President announced a plan to halt the operation.
Talks have continued since and, at times, they seemed to progress towards ending the months-long dispute over a mine that accounts for about 1.5% of the world’s copper production
.
Cobre Panama is the biggest foreign investment in the Central American nation, supporting over 4,000 jobs. (Image courtesy of Minera Panama.)
First Quantum is one of the world’s top copper miners and Canada’s largest producer of the metal. It churned out 816,000 tonnes of copper in 2021, its highest ever, thanks mainly to record output at Cobre Panama.
The mine complex, located about 120 km west of Panama City and 20 km from the Atlantic coast, contributes 3.5% of the Central American country’s gross domestic product, according to government figures.
The asset, which began production in 2019, is estimated to hold 3.1 billion tonnes in proven and probable reserves and at full capacity can produce more than 300,000 tonnes of copper per year, or about 1.5% of global production of the metal.
Panama president says First Quantum talks in ‘final stretch’
Reuters | March 3, 2023 | President Laurentino Cortizo had ordered a halt of commercial operations at Cobre Panama. (Image courtesy of Government of Panama)
Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo said on Friday talks between his government and Canada’s First Quantum Minerals over the operation of a major copper mine were in the final stretch, with only one point still to be resolved.
“We are in the final stretch to reach an agreement, but that agreement has to be beneficial for the Republic of Panama”, said Cortizo in a speech in central Panama’s Veraguas province.
“There is only one point that is currently pending and we hope it will be resolved as soon as possible”, he said.
The Canadian miner, which operates the Cobre Panama mine in the Central American country, has been locked in a prolonged contract dispute with the government, with tax and royalties at the forefront of the stalemate.
Earlier this week, a lawyer advising the government had said that while two issues were almost resolved, a third issue regarded an “economic aspect” involving tax deductions, which the government said would hurt its income from the mine in times of high output and prices.
(By Milagro Vallecillos and Sarah Morland; Editing by Sandra Maler and Diane Craft)
DART impact provided real-time data on evolution of asteroid's debris
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS GRAINGER COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
IMAGE: THESE THREE PANELS CAPTURE THE BREAKUP OF THE ASTEROID DIMORPHOS WHEN IT WAS DELIBERATELY HIT BY NASA'S 1,200-POUND DOUBLE ASTEROID REDIRECTION TEST MISSION SPACECRAFT ON SEPTEMBER 26, 2022. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE HAD A RINGSIDE VIEW OF THE SPACE DEMOLITION DERBY. THE TOP PANEL, TAKEN 2 HOURS AFTER IMPACT, SHOWS AN EJECTA CONE OF AN ESTIMATED 1,000 TONS OF DUST.view more
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, STSCI, JIAN-YANG LI (PSI)
When asteroids suffer natural impacts in space, debris flies off from the point of impact. The tail of particles that form can help determine the physical characteristics of the asteroid. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission in September 2022 gave a team of scientists including Rahil Makadia, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a unique opportunity—to observe the evolution of an asteroid’s ejecta as it happened for the first time.
“My work on this mission so far has been to study the heliocentric changes to the orbit of Didymos and its smaller moon Dimorphos—the target of the DART spacecraft,” said Makadia. “Even though it hit the secondary, there are still some changes in the entire system’s orbit around the sun because the entire system feels the consequences of the impact. The ejecta that escapes the system provides an extra boost in addition to the impact. So, to accurately determine where the system will be in 100 years, you need to know the contribution of the ejecta that escaped the system.”
The team observed a 33-minute change in the orbit after DART’s impact. Makadia said, if there were no ejecta, the period change would have been less than 33 minutes. But because some ejecta escaped the gravitational pull of Dimorphos, the orbit period change is higher than if there were no ejecta at all.
These three panels capture the breakup of the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by NASA's 1,200-pound Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission spacecraft on September 26, 2022. Hubble Space Telescope had a ringside view of the space demolition derby. The top panel, taken 2 hours after impact, shows an ejecta cone of an estimated 1,000 tons of dust. The center frame shows the dynamic interaction within the asteroid's binary system that starts to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern about 17 hours after the impact. The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel is tied to the gravitational pull of the companion asteroid, Didymos. In the bottom frame Hubble next captures the debris being swept back into a comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on the tiny dust particles. This stretches out into a debris train where the lightest particles travel the fastest and farthest from the asteroid. The mystery is compounded when Hubble records the tail splitting in two for a few days.
The study, published in the journal Nature, focused on the Hubble Space Telescope's measurements of the ejecta, beginning 15 minutes after the impact to 18 ½ days after the impact. The images showed the exact evolution of the tail and how it evolved over time.
“After a few days, the primary force acting on these ejecta particles becomes solar radiation pressure,” Makadia said. “The photons emitted from the sun exert an acceleration on these small particles, and they evolve into a straight tail in an anti-solar direction.
“There have been cases in which it was determined that a natural impact caused the observed active asteroid. But because this one was very much intended, we could have telescopes pointed at it before and after the impact and study its evolution.”
He said they’ll use the data about how this ejecta evolves to understand how the entire system's orbit changes as well.
“Now that we have this treasure trove of data, we can make educated guesses about other tails we might observe,” Makadia said. “Depending on what kind of particles are in the tail and their sizes, we can figure out how long ago that impact happened. And we’ll be able to understand the ejecta that escape the system and change the entire system’s heliocentric orbit.”
Makadia, who earned his B.S. in 2020 from UIUC, said almost all of his work is computational.
“To calculate where an asteroid will be on a given date, we need to propagate all the possible locations that the asteroid could be at an initial time, not just one nominal solution. That requires a lot of computational power and understanding of how orbits are affected by small forces, like solar radiation pressure as well as gravity from all kinds of sources within the solar system.
“I developed simulations to study the heliocentric changes when I first started working on my Ph.D. to make sure we have a propagator that can impart all these impulses that are coming from the escaping ejecta. Now I'm developing an orbit determination tool so once we do have enough observations, we can extract this information about the heliocentric change to the system.”
About the project, Makadia said, “This is 100 percent the most exciting thing in my life. It’s absolutely real but so astonishing. Even now, whenever people ask about it, it sounds like I'm talking about a movie plot rather than an actual thing that happened.”
The NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Double Asteroid Redirection Test team which includes Rahil Makadia, his adviser Siegfried Eggl, and Bhaskar Mondal who is another one of Eggl’s Ph.D. students, is receiving the 2023 AIAA Award for Aerospace Excellence. The award states it is “In recognition of humanity’s first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object by a team of protectors of our home planet.”
The study, “Ejecta from the DART-produced active asteroid Dimorphos,” by Jian-Yang Li, et al., is published in the journal Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05811-4
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab built and operated the DART spacecraft and manages the DART mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency’s Planetary Missions Program Office. LICIACube is a project of the Italian Space Agency, carried out by Argotec. Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos pose any hazard to Earth before or after DART’s controlled collision with Dimorphos.For more information about the DART mission, visit https://www.nasa.gov/dart or https://dart.jhuapl.edu.
IMAGE: THE NICOLAUS COPERNICUS UNIVERSITY (TORUN, POLAND) SCIENTISTS: DR HABIL. ANNA BARTKIEWICZ, NCU PROF. AND MGR MICHAL DURJASZview more
CREDIT: ANDRZEJ ROMANSKI/NCU
An international team of astronomers, which includes three researchers affiliated with the Nicolaus Copernicus University (Torun, Poland), has succeeded in mapping the protostellar disk with the highest precision known today. The discovery provides evidence predicted by the theory of episodic accretion.
The work was recognized by the journal Nature Astronomy, where an article has just been published "A Keplerian disk with a four-arm spiral birthing an episodically accreting high-mass protostar". Among the authors - an international group of astronomers specializing in observations of maser emissions - were three researchers affiliated with the Institute of Astronomy at the NCU Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Informatics: dr. habil. Anna Bartkiewicz, NCU Prof., mgr Michal Durjasz, and dr. Mateusz Olech, who defended his doctorate at the Faculty and is now part of the team of the Space Radio Diagnostics Centre at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn).
Joint effort
In his scientific work, dr habil. Anna Bartkiewicz, NCU Prof. is concerned with the study of star-forming objects showing the ring structure of the methanol maser. With the help of the European VLBI Network, she precisely determines the natural motions of the maser clouds at the level of a few kilometres per second. She is currently leading the Opus grant of the National Science Centre "Space masers as a tool for identifying accretion explosions of massive protostars". Michal Durjasz, a PhD student at the Nicolaus Copernicus University Doctoral School of Exact and Natural Sciences, has also made a major contribution to the research, working on areas of massive stars with abrupt changes in methanol maser emission. Both researchers belong to the IDUB Centre of Excellence "Astronomy and Astrophysics" Mateusz Olech, on the other hand, is interested in star-forming regions and periodic changes of methanol masers around massive protostars.
The article, and especially the research that preceded it, is the result of a successful collaboration between experts from around the world.
Observational data acquired from 24 radio telescopes from around the world contributed to our discovery, which was then carefully correlated by teams at three centres on three different continents, explains dr Ross Burns of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, first author of the paper. - Around 150 people were involved, and we would like to express our gratitude to them for their efforts, hoping for further collaboration in the future.
Right: Map of the 6.7 GHz methanol maser emission in G358-MM1, imaged using heatwave mapping. The cross in the center represents the location of the high-mass protostar determined in millimetre wavelength interferometric imaging. Spiral structures can be seen, wrapping around the protostar in a clockwise direction. Colours show the velocity of gas. Regions in blue are moving toward us while red regions show gas that is moving away. Overall, the colours indicate that the system is rotating, in the form of a Keplerian disk, around G358-MM1 Credit: Charles Willmott and Ross Burns
CREDIT
Credit: Charles Willmott and Ross Burns
Mysteries of the stars
The researchers focused on observations of massive stars, i.e. those with masses greater than eight masses of the Sun. They play a key role in the production of the elements necessary to build life in the Universe and also influence the formation and evolution of galaxies. The most massive stars die and become enigmatic black holes.
Despite their importance in the Universe, the process of massive star formation has been shrouded in mystery for many decades.
So far, there has been no single theory accepted by the entire scientific community to explain their formation, explains Professor Anna Bartkiewicz. - It has only recently been confirmed that massive stars are born in the centres of rotating disks composed of gas and dust. Protostellar disks, as they are called, have a radius of about one thousand astronomical units, i.e., the average distance between the Earth and the Sun multiplied by one thousand [the astronomical unit, or conventional measure of distance used in astronomy, is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun; i.e., 149597870.7 km, or - editor's note].
One theory of massive star formation that is becoming increasingly popular among researchers is episodic accretion.
Accretion, or the deposition of matter on a star. It involves clouds of dusty gas occasionally 'breaking off' and dropping from the disk onto a growing protostar, i.e., a young star located in the centre, explains mgr Michał Durjasz, - During such surges in the rate of matter accretion, the star accumulates more than half of the mass it gains during the formation stage. These accretion rate surges, or episodic accretion, are very rare events: they occur every hundreds or thousands of years and last from a few months to a few years.
Until now, astronomers have only witnessed a few such phenomena. The most recent and most thoroughly studied was the rapid accretion of the massive protostar G358-MM1 (the name is related to the object's coordinates in the sky) in 2019.
- The episodic accretion theory suggests that protostellar disks are massive and inhomogeneous. Due to the influence of their own gravity, spiral arms may appear in them, adds dr Mateusz Olech. - The very observation of protostellar disks in the areas of birth of massive stars is a challenge for astronomers - they are formed in dense molecular clouds that are impenetrable to conventional optical astronomy. Observing potential spiral arms is even more challenging.
Disk map
In the latest publication in Nature Astronomy, an international team of astronomers specialising in observations of maser emission - which is the naturally-occurring cosmic counterpart of a laser at microwave radio wavelengths - has been able to obtain maps of the protostellar disk with the highest precision known today. Using a network of radio telescopes, so-called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), the scientists discovered spiral arms in the rotating disk of a high-mass protostar - G358-MM1. This is the same protostar that underwent rapid accretion in 2019.
The team used a new technique called 'heat-wave mapping', which produces a set of maps of the brightened masers of methanol molecules at different stages of an event. A total of 24 radio telescopes from Oceania, Asia, Europe and America were used. This allowed us to image the G358-MM1 spiral disk with a resolution of one angular millisecond, i.e., 1/3600000th of a degree, explains Prof Bartkiewicz. - G358-MM1 has four spiral arms that wrap around the protostar. These help to carry material from the disk to the centre of the system, where it can reach the protostar. If more spiral systems and this type of brightness are discovered, astronomers will be able to understand better the processes that accompany the birth of high-mass stars, which are the true cradle of life in the Universe.
The discovery provides observational evidence for several aspects predicted by episodic accretion theory: a rotating disk, rapid brightening and a spiral structure that helps 'feed' a growing high-mass protostar. The team will continue to search for such bursts of maser emission, using a global collaboration of traditional radio telescopes called the Maser Monitoring Organisation (M2O https://www.masermonitoring.com/). So far, only three rapid brightening high-mass protostars have been observed, but the researchers hope to find many more.
IMAGE: A MIXED COLONY OF CLONAL RAIDER ANTS CONTAINING QUEEN-LIKE MUTANTS THAT HAVE RUDIMENTARY WINGS OR WING STUBS. OLDER WORKERS ARE DARK BROWN, WHILE THE LIGHTER COLORED INDIVIDUALS ARE ONLY A FEW DAYS OLD.view more
CREDIT: DANIEL KRONAUER
Ants are known as hard workers, tirelessly attending to their assigned tasks—foraging for food, nurturing larvae, digging tunnels, tidying the nest. But in truth, some are total layabouts. Called workerless social parasites, these rare species exist only as queens, and they die without workers to tend to them. To survive, parastic ants infiltrate a colony of closely related ants, where, as long as they keep their numbers relatively low, they and their offspring become the leisure class of the colony.
It’s long been thought that these determinedly lazy insects likely evolved their queenly characteristics one by one, through a series of mutations, in an isolated setting. Now scientists in the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, together with their collaborators at Harvard University, have a new theory. As they report in Current Biology, they’ve discovered queen-like mutants—parasitic ants that spontaneously appeared in colonies of clonal raider ants, which are typically queenless.
“This mutant is like the precursor to other parasitic species,” says Waring Trible, lead author of the study. “It’s a new way of understanding how ants evolve to become socially parasitic.”
Delving into the genetics of these unique ants could be a way to better understand the molecular mechanisms behind caste differentiation, or how an ant develops into a worker or a queen, which remain unknown. It could also help illuminate biological development in organisms in general.
Hiding in plain sight
Among the more than 15,000 identified ant species are hundreds that qualify as social parasites. Born inside a host colony, a parasitic ant will leave the colony, use a sex pheromone to attract a male from another colony to mate with, and once pregnant, will infiltrate the original colony or find another nearby. She’ll often use subterfuge to sneak past colony guards. The shampoo ant, for example, will snatch a few ants just outside a nest entrance, lick them to acquire the colony’s signature chemical scent, and then lick herself all over to transfer it to her own body. Chemically cloaked, she then can slip inside to live out her life and reproduce both new queens and males who mate outside the colony. The males die, and the queens begin the cycle again.
Because of their uniqueness, they’ve been studied extensively by biologists since Charles Darwin, still there’s been a sticking point in a prevailing theory of their evolution, says Daniel Kronauer, the Stanley S. and Sydney R. Shuman Associate Professor at Rockefeller University, and head of the lab. They’re closely related to their hosts, but if they had to acquire these parasitic traits over time, they would need to be isolated during reproduction, otherwise interbreeding with their hosts would wash out their unique traits. But no one has found intermediately evolved ants—ones with some social parasite traits but not others—in the wild, says Kronauer.
When queen-like ants suddenly appeared among the clonal raider ants in Kronauer’s lab in 2015, Trible—who was looking to investigate genetic mechanisms behind caste differentiation—took notice. Because clonal raider ants typically have no queens and reproduce asexually, the queen-like mutants stood out: they were born with wings, larger eyes and ovaries, and as adults showed a general indifference towards labor.
But it turned out they were nothing new—they’d had been hiding for years in dense colonies whose numbers obscured their presence. Genetic analysis revealed that they had mutated into existence inside the colony in which they were first detected—a community of otherwise normal ants that Kronauer had collected in Okinawa, Japan, in 2008, and that still lived in the lab. It was a clue that the typical story of parasite ant invasion might need rethinking.
The researchers then ran a series of experiments and genetic analyses. One of the first experiments was to isolate them to see whether the phenotype was heritable. Because clonal raider ants reproduce asexually, they didn’t have to worry about interbreeding with other ants.
The queen-like mutants lay eggs that developed into copies of themselves. “We knew we had something cool,” Kronauer says.
They also tested behavior. Foraging parties composed entirely of queen-like mutants were half the size of those of worker ants, and they were far less likely to try to enlist other ants to track down food. These behaviors were a sort of intermediary between the diligence of worker ants and the dependence of queens, and allowed the mutant ants to avoid the dangers inherent to leaving the safety of the colony.
Despite laying twice as many eggs as their hosts, the ants self-regulate their head count. As long as their numbers stay below about 25 percent of the host population, they do well. More than that and they run into trouble. Queens need help from workers to free their wings as they emerge from the pupae, and if there are too many queens for the workers to look after, they’ll die entangled in their pupal skin.
“They seem to have the ability to regulate their own reproduction so that they don’t drive their host colony extinct, which is a very smart thing for a parasite to do,” says Trible, a former member of Kronauer’s lab who now runs his own lab at Harvard studying these and other mutants. “This provides these mutants the capacity to survive for long periods of time.”
The influence of hormones
Whole-genome sequencing revealed that the parasitic queens have a mutation in chromosome 13, which is structurally similar to chromosomes that regulate colony social structure in other ants. This mutant chromosome seems to contain a “supergene,” a set of genes that work together to create a phenotype. In this case, the supergene contains more than 200 individual genes, a disproportionate number of which assist in the metabolism of hormones. These include genes that code for cytochrome p450 enzymes, which are required to synthesize hormones in both ants and humans, and may play a role in the creation of these highly unusual mutants. (This enzyme family may be familiar to anyone who has been warned to not drink grapefruit juice while taking certain medications because the juice inhibits the enzymes from detoxifying the drugs.)
It appears that with this single mutation, “their form, the higher egg production, the behavior—it can all shift in a single mutational step,” Kronauer says.
And if that’s the case, Trible says, “it would be a way that it’s actually possible to go from a normal ant to a parasite within a single species.”
That idea—that two very different forms of an animal can arise in a single species—gets at the heart of the mystery of ant castes. Because workerless social parasites arise from a very specific type of mutation affecting ant caste development, studying the queen-like mutants has the potential to reveal insights into the still-unknown molecular mechanisms that allow ant larvae to develop distinct caste morphologies. “It provides a very comprehensive framework in which to study their evolution,” says Kronauer.
Size matters
The findings could also lead to further research on an important process of development known as allometric scaling that happens in all animals, including humans, Trible says. Allometric scaling keeps the tissues of an organism proportional to its body size as it grows.
Its mechanisms are unknown, but understanding them likely has relevance to many aspects of human biology, including disease, says Trible. Perhaps queen-like mutants can provide a new avenue of investigation. “We don’t have good examples of mutations in fruit flies or mice or human genetic disorders that break allometric scaling in such a dramatic way,” he says. “We think this queen-like mutant will be a powerful tool for understanding caste development, and caste development is in turn an ideal model to investigate these larger questions about how allometric scaling works.”
IMAGE: MEAT LESS IS DAVID JULIAN MCCLEMENTS' 11TH BOOK.view more
CREDIT: SPRINGER PUBLISHING
Distinguished Professor of Food Science and prolific author David Julian McClements has a new book out this month – Meat Less: The Next Food Revolution (Springer, 2023).
Meat Less describes McClements’ journey to vegetarianism, a shift inspired by his daughter and his ongoing research work on developing healthier and more sustainable foods.
“In writing this book I take the viewpoint that there are no easy answers and that everyone must make the decision to eat meat or not based on their own values,” says McClements, a pioneering scientist who has written 11 books that explore the physics, chemistry and biology of improving the quality, safety and healthiness of foods.
At UMass, McClements is part of a multidisciplinary team that holistically explores the science and technology – including protein chemistry, soft matter physics, food engineering, sensory science, gastrointestinal fate and gut microbiome effects – behind the design and fabrication of plant-based foods that are better for humans and the planet.
In Meat Less, McClements examines the impact of meat consumption on the environment, human nutrition, animal welfare and food safety, delving into how much eating meat contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, biodiversity loss, antimicrobial resistance and zoonotic diseases (infections that spread between people and animals), as well as their impact on human health and well-being.
He discusses the latest advances in science and technology that are leading to more tasty, healthy and sustainable alternatives to real meat. These plant-, microbial-, lab-grown and insect-based meat analogs mimic the appearance, flavor and texture of meat. “The availability of more of these products will facilitate the worldwide transition to a more environmentally friendly and ethical diet,” McClements says.
At the end of the book, McClements presents his vision of the human diet in 2050.
“In the final chapter, I discuss why I remain a vegetarian and have decided to dedicate the rest of my scientific career to finding sustainable and healthy alternatives to meat,” he says.
David Julian McClements is a Distinguished Professor of Food Science at UMass Amherst.
CREDIT
UMass Amherst
Meat Less is available for preorder now from major booksellers.
$10 million grant will help MU double the acreage of cover crops in the US by 2030
Five-year USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant will help double cover crop seed production.
IMAGE: CRIMSON CLOVER TEST PLOTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BRADFORD RESEARCH AND EXTENSION CENTERview more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI
Rob Myers, director of MU’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture, is leading a new $10 million grant project from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), to support farmers and improve agriculture practices during severe weather and a warming climate.
The project aims to help double the acreage of cover crops in the U.S. to 40 million acres by 2030. Cover crops — plants that are used to protect and improve soil during a time when other crops are not being grown — help reduce soil erosion, improve soil health, smother weeds, control pests and diseases, and improve biodiversity.
“It was really pivotal to get this funding because one of the biggest factors that could limit future growth in acres of cover crops is having an adequate seed supply,” Myers said. “We also really need improved varieties that are well-adapted to different regions, soil types and cropping systems, so that farmers can get maximum benefit from the cover crops they are using.”
The project involves collaboration among 14 MU faculty, 38 scientists from across the country, 17 states, 12 universities, three seed companies, the American Seed Trade Association, three USDA Agricultural Research Service locations and three USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Plant Materials Centers.
“It’s exciting to see scientists from so many disciplines at MU collaborating with colleagues across the country on groundbreaking research,” said Mun Choi, University of Missouri president. “By bringing together animal scientists, crop scientists, soil scientists and agricultural economists, we can discover more effective solutions that will be transformational for farmers, Missourians and Americans nationwide. This project will add economic value to farms while our researchers work to preserve the soil that is so critical for future food growth.”
Along with doubling the seed production for cover crops and distributing them to farmers nationwide, Myers’ team will educate farmers about new varieties of cover crops and examine which types are best suited for different regions of the country, depending on geography, weather conditions and types of soil.
“This project will provide great collaboration with farmers and seed companies to provide new cover crop varieties helping protect and improve soils across the U.S.,” said Christopher Daubert, vice chancellor and dean of the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. “It’s the type of integrated effort involving research, extension and education that we strive to support through the College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources.”
Myers, who grew up on a farm in Illinois that uses cover crops, said the project has the potential to have an enormous impact on farmland across the U.S.
“Whether it’s cover crops or other plants, we tend to just notice the part of the plant we can see above the ground, but the roots below the ground are equally important. One challenge is that we currently don’t know a lot about how different varieties of cover crops perform with the growth of the roots because we can’t see it,” Myers said. “For this project, we will examine how different cover crop roots help put carbon in the soil, which is a helpful adaptation in the midst of climate change.”
The $10 million grant is the largest grant MU has earned from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Myers recently earned a $25 million grant — the largest federal grant ever awarded to an MU faculty member — to help Missouri farmers adopt climate-smart practices.
“Agriculture is the largest industry in Missouri, and the experts we have here at MU are not only improving farming practices throughout the Midwest, but also across the country,” said Michael Williams, chair of the UM System Board of Curators. “MU research is critical to improving the health and well-being of Missourians, and these large grants are only awarded to scientists who have demonstrated they are among the best in the country.”
