Manganese could help transform sunlight into energy more sustainably than iridium, ruthenium

MINING.COM Staff Writer | August 3, 2021 | 

Manganese. (Image by Antonio Jordán, Imaggeo).

Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have produced the first-ever luminescent manganese complexes in which exposure to light causes the same reactions as in ruthenium or iridium compounds.


Iridium is normally used in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and ruthenium is employed in solar cells. These metals, however, are very rare and by virtue of their scarcity, very expensive.

Manganese, on the other hand, is 900,000 times more abundant in the Earth’s crust than iridium, as well as being significantly less toxic and many times cheaper. These are the reasons why the Swiss scientists decided to focus on it in their quest to produce more sustainable luminescent materials and catalysts for converting sunlight into other forms of energy.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry, the research team led by Oliver Wenger and Patrick Herr explain that in their current development stage, the new manganese complexes perform worse than iridium compounds in terms of their luminous efficiency. However, the light-driven reactions that are needed for artificial photosynthesis such as energy- and electron-transfer reactions take place at high speed.

MANGANESE IS 900,000 TIMES MORE ABUNDANT IN THE EARTH’S CRUST THAN IRIDIUM, AS WELL AS BEING SIGNIFICANTLY LESS TOXIC AND MANY TIMES CHEAPER

This performance is due to the special structure of the new complexes, which leads to an immediate charge transfer from the manganese toward its direct bonding partners on excitation with light. This design principle for complexes is already used in certain types of solar cells, although until now it has mostly featured noble metal compounds, and sometimes complexes based on the less noble metal copper.

The group also incorporated tailor-made molecular components into the complexes to force the manganese into a rigid environment. This allowed them to suppress the distortions that normally occur in complexes made of cheap metals — compared to noble metal compounds — when light energy is absorbed. This was an important limitation to overcome because when complexes begin to vibrate, a large part of the absorbed light energy is lost.

Having forced manganese into a rigid environment also allowed the team to increase the stability of the resulting compounds and their resistance to decomposition processes.

Until now, no one had succeeded in creating molecular complexes with manganese that can glow in solution at room temperature and that have these special reaction properties.

In the paper, Wenger and his group wrote that, in future research projects, they want to improve the luminescent properties of the new manganese complexes and anchor them on suitable semiconductor materials for use in solar cells.

An Edmonton-area resident is producing the world's top quality olive oil

Conchita Galvez

CTVNewsEdmonton.ca 

Digital Journalist
Wednesday, August 4, 2021 

A St. Albert man is producing premium extra virgin olive oil in Greece and distributing it exclusively within Alberta.

EDMONTON -- A St. Albert man is producing premium extra virgin olive oil in Greece and distributing it exclusively within Alberta.

George Pananos grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece. He moved to Canada in 1978 and it was not until a few years ago that he realized there was something missing from Alberta’s food market – a “pure and natural extra virgin olive oil.”

After inheriting a family farm in Greece, Pananos decided to develop the land to produce olives. What started as a hobby for the Edmonton-area resident is now a prized product in Alberta. Harvesting and exporting the bottles of wine in Greece, he then exports the olive oil back to Canada.

“As it happens with every small producer of olive oil who is proud of what he makes, we entered the very prestigious New York International Olive Oil Competition (NYIOOC) just to see how good our product was,” said Pananos.

“We didn’t know how good it was in comparison to others. To our surprise, we won gold in New York in 2019,” he added.

Entering the prestigious competition again in 2020, Pananos took home gold two years in a row. With a total of two gold medals and one silver medal, Pananos says it shows that he has a good product.

Priding himself on producing a natural product with the best practices, the St. Albert resident says his olive oil is distinguished by a “grass flavour.” Using green olives, Pananos says the olives will not produce the same amount of oil as brown olives but the quality is much better.

“We sacrifice quantity for quality,” he said.

A bold flavour, fruitful, and grass-like flavour and high amount of antioxidants is what makes Pananos’ olive oil a sought-after product.

Serving primarily in Edmonton and Calgary, the Pillar Grove Estate bottles are sold in St. Albert’s Italian Bakery's Mercato and Edmonton’s Italian Centre.

“We are very proud to say that we distribute only in Alberta,” he said.

Pillar Grove Estate produced 4,000 bottles in 2019. In 2020, the farm produced 5,500 bottles of extra virgin olive oil.

With files from Darcy Seaton

Chess World Cup: Carlsen’s brilliance on display

by Carlos Alberto Colodro

8/4/2021 – A brilliant victory with the black pieces gave Magnus Carlsen the lead in the match for third place against Vladimir Fedoseev at the FIDE World Cup in Sochi. Meanwhile, Sergey Karjakin was surprised in the opening by Jan-Krzysztof Duda, which prompted him to agree to a quick draw in his game with the white pieces. 

| Photo: Eteri Kublashvili

A model exchange sacrifice

While most of the elite players fight to become the challenger for the World Championship, the reigning champion only waits and prepares for his next match. Some of the past champions decided to keep their cards close to their chests, barely playing classical elite tournaments while waiting for the next match. The reigning champion, on the other hand, cannot keep himself from competing in serious events against his potential opponents.

Scarcely any world champion has managed to captivate chess lovers to the extent Carlsen has. The enormously talented Norwegian hasn't been systematically trained within the structures of a major chess-playing nation such as Russia, the Ukraine or China.

After losing his semifinal match against Jan-Krzysztof Duda, Magnus Carlen tweeted:

Losing today certainly hurts, but I am nevertheless happy with my progress in the tournament, and also getting great practice for later this year.

This is, in fact, the second time Carlsen plays in the World Cup since he became world champion (in 2017, he was knocked out by Bu Xiangzhi in the third round). Talking to Michael Rahal after his win over Vladimir Fedoseev, Carlsen noted that game 2 of the playoffs against Duda was the first time he was in real trouble at the lengthy tournament, and that he could not adjust properly to the circumstances, failing to save a draw from a defensible position.

The Norwegian is yet to win a World Cup and, given how competitive he has proven to be over the years, we expect him to continue participating in next editions, looking to get one of the few trophies missing in his cabinet — he was certainly close to getting it this year!

Magnus Carlsen beat Vladimir Fedoseev on Wednesday. Photo: David Llada/FIDE.

FIDE World Cup Finals: Carlsen Wins Masterpiece

PeterDoggers
Updated: Aug 5, 2021, 1:43 AM|
51|Chess Event Coverage

GM Magnus Carlsen bounced back strongly from his lost FIDE World Cup semifinal. The world champion played a masterpiece with the black pieces on Wednesday and defeated GM Vladimir Fedoseev in the first game of the match for third place. The final of the World Cup started with a very quick draw between GM Sergey Karjakin and GM Jan-Krzysztof Duda.

How to watch?
The games of the FIDE World Cup can be found here: Open | Women. Chess.com provides daily commentary on Chess.com/TV and Twitch.tv/chess with GM Hou Yifan, GM Ben Finegold, IM Danny Rensch, GM Robert Hess, GM Viswanathan Anand, and other guests.

Costa Rica eyes permanent ban on fossil fuel exploration and extraction

A Spanish tourist crosses a bridge over the Celeste river at Tenorio Volcano National Park in Upala March 18, 2008. The blue color of the lagoon, formed from chemical reactions of calcium carbonate and sulfur, is surrounded by an amazing rainforest that constitutes 12,819 hectares of this park. REUTERS/Juan Carlos Ulate (COSTA RICA)

Aug 4 (Reuters) - Costa Rican lawmakers this week will discuss a bill to permanently ban fossil fuel exploration and extraction, a move that would prevent future governments from pivoting on the issue as the popular eco-tourism destination country aims to decarbonize by 2050.

Costa Rica started efforts to ban fossil fuel exploration in 2002 under President Abel Pacheco. This ban was supposed to expire in 2014 but later extended until 2050. The new bill, backed by the administration of President Carlos Alvarado, would go further by permanently banning it.

"Our concern now is to remove the temptation, either today or at any time tomorrow, for there to be any current or future government who might think that returning to fossil fuels of the past century is actually a good idea for our country,” Christiana Figueres, a former U.N. climate chief and former Costa Rican government official who has publicly advocated for the bill, said in an interview with Reuters.

Only a few other countries have taken action to ban fossil fuel exploration and production, including France which aims to do so by 2040, and Belize, which prohibits exploration and drilling in all its territorial waters.

Costa Rica's rich biodiversity draws international tourists to its jungles and coastal eco-resorts, and it is considered a global model on climate change initiatives. It has never explored or extracted fossil fuels and gets 99% of its electricity from renewable sources, primarily hydropower, according to officials. The country of 5 million people aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

A permanent ban would "send a powerful message to the world," lawmaker Paola Vega told Reuters.

A pro-exploration movement has been trying since 2019 to garner support for a referendum on oil and gas exploration but has failed to bring about a vote. The bill for a permanent fossil fuel ban has faced opposition by some politicians who argue that the resources could help the Central American country bounce back from an 8.7% dip in GDP in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic.

Figueres, one of the architects of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, said fossil fuel extraction for economic recovery "makes absolutely no sense," as the Costa Rica's reserves have not been proven commercially viable.

"Were we to have them, we probably wouldn't see any income from them until at least 10 to 15 years from now, when the demand for oil and gas is actually going to be even less than it is now," Figueres said, adding she believes the ban has a good chance at approval.

"To have small countries actually take the lead is very important, because those of us that are actually doing the right thing, we definitely punch above our weight,” Figueres added. "Just because Costa Rica is tiny, it doesn't mean that we don't have a voice."

Lawmakers will hold discussions on the bill this week, though a vote may not come before October, according to a lawmaker involved.
Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; additional reporting by Alvaro Murillo in San Jose; Editing by David Gregorio

Space Station tumbled end-over-end due to Russian module thruster glitch

Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

•  

Wednesday, August 4th 2021

This was possibly the worse emergency the space station suffered in its 20+ years of operation

A computer glitch has been blamed for the incident, which saw the International Space Station flip end-over-end in orbit.

Early in the morning on July 29, 2021, a new section of the space station arrived and docked to the Russian end of the orbital outpost. Nauka, or наука ("the science" in Russian), is also named the Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM).

Nauka docked with the ISS, with Soyuz MS-18 at the lower right. Credit: Roscosmos

A few hours after its arrival, while the Russian cosmonauts were checking Nauka's connections to the rest of the station, a computer glitch caused its thrusters to suddenly begin firing. Emitting a continuous stream of thruster gas, Nauka began pushing the station out of alignment, resulting in it tumbling end-over-end as it orbited the planet.

The crew on the ground - both at Roscosmos and NASA - worked quickly to get the situation under control. With no apparent way to turn off Nauka's thrusters, Roscosmos first activated the thrusters on the Zvezda Service Module in an attempt to counter-balance the thrust from Nauka. To gain the upper hand, though, they also switched on the thrusters of the docked Progress 78 cargo ship, currently on the exact opposite side of Zvezda from Nauka.

This computer simulation of the ISS shows the location of the new Nauka module in relation to the spacecraft currently docked or berthed at the station. In preparation for this docking manuever, the station was travelling in this orientation towards the right of the image, with Russian section as the leading end. Credit: NASA

In a report on Monday, Roscosmos called the problem "a short-term software failure."

Although NASA initially reported that the station was knocked only about 45 degrees out of position by Nauka's thrusters, it turned out to be quite a bit more once they assessed the incident in the aftermath.

Talking to the New York Times, NASA flight controller Zebulon Scoville said that the unexpected thrust resulted in the station performing a slow backflip. At around half a degree per second, the ISS turned a total of 540 degrees before the combined counter-thrust from Zvezda and Progress 78 could stop it.

From there, with still no way to shut down the out-of-control thrusters, they simply had to wait until Nauka ran out of fuel.

Now, flipping over is not unusual for the space station. It apparently performed a 180-degree flip sometime before Nauka's arrival to orient the Russian part of the station as the leading end. However, even though the station ended up roughly in its usual orientation (with Zvezda as the trailing end) by the time this incident was over, having your football-field sized orbital lab flip end-over-end one and a half times is not an ideal situation.

"This is one of the more serious incidents in the 24-year-history of the ISS," Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told George Dvorsky at Gizmodo. "The loss of attitude control in principle risks breakup of the complex."

With the incident now over, the station crew has accessed Nauka and are integrating it into the station. According to NASA, Nauka will serve as a new science facility, docking port, and spacewalk airlock for future operations.

Impact of space station spin requires study, official says

Vladimir Isachenkov
The Associated Press
Published Wednesday, August 4, 2021 


Nauka module approaches the International Space Station space station, on July 29, 2021. (NASA via AP)

MOSCOW -- Space engineers will analyze whether a glitch that caused the International Space Station to spin out of its normal orientation could have impacted any of its systems, a Russian space official said Wednesday.

Sergei Krikalev, the director of crewed space programs at the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, emphasized that last week's incident did not inflict any observable damage to the space station but he said that experts would need to study its potential implications.

"It appears there is no damage," Krikalev said in an interview broadcast by Russian state television. "But it's up to specialists to assess how we have stressed the station and what the consequences are."

NASA emphasized Wednesday that the station was operating normally and noted that the spin was within safety limits for its systems.

Thrusters on Russia's Nauka laboratory module fired shortly after the module arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday, making the orbiting outpost slowly spin about one-and-a-half revolutions. Russia's mission controllers fired thrusters on another Russian module and a Russian cargo ship attached to the space station to stop rotation and then push the station back to its normal position.

Both U.S. and Russian space officials said the station's seven-person crew wasn't in danger during the incident.

The station needs to be properly aligned to get the maximum power from solar panels and to maintain communications with space support teams back on Earth. The space station's communications with ground controllers blipped out twice for a few minutes on Thursday.

NASA said in a tweet Tuesday that the station was 45 degrees out of alignment when Nauka's thrusters were still firing and the loss of control was discussed with the crew. "Further analysis showed total attitude change before regaining normal attitude control was (tilde)540 degrees," NASA said.

On Wednesday, NASA noted that "continued analysis following last week's event with unplanned thruster firings on Nauka has shown the space station remains in good shape with systems performing normally."

"Most importantly, the maximum rate and acceleration of the attitude change did not approach safety limits for station systems and normal operations resumed once attitude control was regained," it said.

Roscosmos' Krikalev, a veteran of six space missions who spent a total of 803 days in orbit, noted Wednesday that firing orientation engines created a dynamic load on the station's components, making a thorough analysis of whether some of them could be overstressed necessary.

"The station is a rather delicate structure, and both the Russian and the U.S. segments are built as light as possible," he said. "An additional load stresses the drivers of solar batteries and the frames they are mounted on. Specialists will analyze the consequences. It is too early to talk about how serious it was, but it was an unforeseen situation that requires a detailed study."

Krikalev said Nauka's engines fired because a glitch in the control system mistakenly assumed that the lab module hadn't yet docked at the station and activated the thrusters to pull it away.

The launch of the 22-ton (20-metric-ton) module has been repeatedly delayed by technical problems. It was initially scheduled to go up in 2007, but funding problems pushed the launch back, and in 2013 experts found contamination in its fuel system, resulting in a long and costly replacement. Other Nauka systems also underwent modernization or repairs.

Nauka is the first new compartment for the Russian segment of the International Space Station since 2010, offering more space for scientific experiments and room for the crew. Russian crew members will have to conduct up to 11 spacewalks beginning in early September to prepare it for operation.

The space station is currently operated by NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur; Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov of Roscosmos; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

In 1998, Russia launched the station's first compartment, Zarya, which was followed in 2000 by another big piece, Zvezda, and three smaller modules in the following years. The last of them, Rassvet, arrived at the station in 2010.

 

Dinosaur-Killing Chicxulub Asteroid Came from Outer Part of Main Belt, Study Suggests

Aug 2, 2021 by News Staff / Source

 

A team of planetary scientists from the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute has combined computer models of asteroid evolution with observations of known asteroids to investigate the frequency of so-called Chicxulub events.

Ankylosaurus magniventris, a large armored dinosaur species, witnesses the impact of an asteroid, falling on the Yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago. Image credit: Fabio Manucci.

At the end of the Cretaceous period, about 66 million years ago, a 10-km impactor crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico.

The impact unleashed an incredible amount of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and 75% of life on the planet.

Over the last several decades, much has been learned about the Chicxulub event, but every advance has led to new questions.

“Two critical ones still unanswered are: ‘What was the source of the impactor?’ and ‘How often did such impact events occur on Earth in the past?’” said Dr. William Bottke, co-author of the study.

The Chicxulub impactor was similar to the carbonaceous chondrite class of meteorites, some of the most pristine materials in the Solar System.

Curiously, while carbonaceous chondrites are common among the many large bodies that approach the Earth, none today are close to the sizes needed to produce the Chicxulub impact with any kind of reasonable probability.

“We decided to look for where the siblings of the Chicxulub impactor might be hiding,” said Dr. David Nesvorný, lead author of the study.

The researchers used computer models that track how objects escape the main asteroid belt, a zone of small bodies located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Over eons, thermal forces allow these objects to drift into dynamical ‘escape hatches’ where the gravitational kicks of the planets can push them into orbits nearing Earth.

Using NASA’s Pleaides Supercomputer, they followed 130,000 model asteroids evolving in this slow, steady manner for hundreds of millions of years.

Particular attention was given to asteroids located in the outer half of the asteroid belt, the part that is furthest from the Sun.

To their surprise, the scientists found that 10-km-wide asteroids from this region strike the Earth at least 10 times more often than previously calculated.

“This result is intriguing not only because the outer half of the asteroid belt is home to large numbers of carbonaceous chondrite impactors, but also because the team’s simulations can, for the first time, reproduce the orbits of large asteroids on the verge of approaching Earth,” said Dr. Simone Marchi, co-author of the study.

“Our explanation for the source of the Chicxulub impactor fits in beautifully with what we already know about how asteroids evolve.”

Overall, the authors found that 10-km-wide asteroids hit the Earth once every 250 million years on average, a timescale that yields reasonable odds that the Chicxulub crater occurred 66 million years ago.

Moreover, nearly half of impacts were from carbonaceous chondrites, a good match with what is known about the Chicxulub impactor.

“This work will help us better understand the nature of the Chicxulub impact, while also telling us where other large impactors from Earth’s deep past might have originated,” Dr. Nesvorný said.

The findings appear in the journal Icarus.

_____

David Nesvorný et al. 2021. Dark primitive asteroids account for a large share of K/Pg-scale impacts on the Earth. Icarus 368: 114621; doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114621

 

Mysterious Oxygen Burst Was Tied to Earth's Biggest Mass Extinction, Scientists Say

DAVID NIELD

4 AUGUST 2021

The Permian-Triassic extinction event that happened some 252 million years ago is the worst extinction event our planet has ever seen. It wiped out around 90 percent of marine species and some 70 percent of vertebrate species on land, and was so severe that it's often called the Great Dying.

There are still lots of unanswered questions about the event, from its overall timescale to its causes, but a new study offers some intriguing extra detail on the calamity: a sudden spike in oxygen levels in the world's oceans at the same time as this widespread extinction was happening.

The researchers behind the study think that the sudden burst of oceanic oxygenation occurred around the start of the Great Dying, and was spread across tens of thousands of years, before oxygen levels then began to steadily drop again.

"For the geological record, that's practically instantaneous," says Earth scientist Sean Newby from Florida State University (FSU).

"And then you can of course compare that to modern, human-induced climate change, where we're having huge, rapid changes in fractions of the time compared to this mass extinction."

Without the aid of a time machine, measuring oxygen levels in the ocean eons ago isn't easy, but the team analyzed thallium isotopes buried in ocean sediments as a way of estimating the chemical mix of seawater stretching back millions of years.

Scientists have previously observed a slow reduction in ocean oxygen levels – technically known as ocean anoxia – across the course of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, but this earlier spike in oxygenation hasn't been seen before.

The next question is what caused it and what it means. It could be possible that a rise and then sudden fall in ocean oxygen levels is more dangerous for marine species than a more gradual decline, the researchers suggest.

"There's previous work that's been done that shows the environment becoming less oxygenated leading into the extinction event, but it has been hypothesized as a gradual change," says Newby.

"We were surprised to see this really rapid oxygenation event coinciding with the start of the extinction and then a return to reducing conditions."

Next, the researchers want to carry out further studies using the same techniques, looking at other mass extinctions to see if similar large-scale shifts in ocean oxygenation might have occurred.

An intense injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is likely to have brought about the Great Dying, scientists think, quite possibly originating from Siberian volcanic activity across a vast scale.

If we can understand more about how this oxygen spike came about – and how it might have contributed to the extinction event – then that's another piece of useful information we can use in assessing the ongoing impacts of the climate crisis today.

"The loss of oxygen is important because the organisms living now are adapted for high oxygen, but if you have low oxygen there's also many organisms that may be able to adapt," says marine biochemist Jeremy Owens, from FSU.

"Any rapid fluctuation in either direction will have an impact."

The research has been published in Nature Geoscience.

OMG! IT CAME FROM THE DRIVE-IN

Giant bird-eating centipedes exist — and they’re surprisingly important for their ecosystem

Daniel Terrington, Author provided (no reuse)

August 3, 2021 5.51pm EDT

Giant bird-eating centipedes may sound like something out of a science-fiction film — but they’re not. On tiny Phillip Island, part of the South Pacific’s Norfolk Island group, the Phillip Island centipede (Cormocephalus coynei) population can kill and eat up to 3,700 seabird chicks each year.

And this is entirely natural. This unique creature endemic to Phillip Island has a diet consisting of an unusually large proportion of vertebrate animals including seabird chicks.

Phillip Island in the Norfolk Island group, with a valley of iconic Norfolk Island Pine trees. 

Luke Halpin

As large marine predators, seabirds usually sit at the top of the food chain. But our new study, published in The American Naturalist, demonstrates this isn’t always the case.

We show how large, predatory arthropods can play an important role in the food webs of island ecosystems. And the Phillip Island centipede achieves this through its highly varied diet.

Read more: Ancient marvels: the first shell-crushing predators ground up their prey between their legs
A well-armed predator stirs in the night

This centipede can grow to almost one foot (or 30.5cm) in length. It is armed with a potent venom encased in two pincer-like appendages called “forcipules”, which it uses to immobilise its prey. Its body is protected by shield-like armoured plates that line each of the many segments that make up its length

.
Phillip Island centipede and black-winged petrel. Luke Halpin, Author provided (no reuse)

On warm and humid nights, these strictly nocturnal arthropods hunt through thick leaf litter, navigating a labyrinth of seabird burrows peppered across the forest floor. A centipede on the prowl will use its two ultra-sensitive antennae to navigate as it seeks prey.

The centipede hunts an unexpectedly varied range of quarry, from crickets to seabird chicks, geckos and skinks. It even hunts fish — dropped by seabirds called black noddies (Anous minuta) that make their nests in the trees above.

A frightful discovery

Soon after we began our research on the ecology of Phillip Island’s burrowing seabirds, we discovered chicks of black-winged petrels (Pterodroma nigripennis) were falling prey to the Phillip Island centipede.

We knew this needed further investigation, so we set out to unravel the mystery of this large arthropod’s dietary habits.

Black-winged petrel chick just prior to being weighed on Phillip Island. Trudy Chatwin

To find out what these centipedes were eating, we studied their feeding activities at night and recorded the prey species they were targeting. We also monitored petrel chicks in their burrow nests every few days, for months at a time.

We eventually began to see consistent injury patterns among chicks that were killed. We even witnessed one centipede attacking and eating a chick.

From the rates of predation we observed, we calculated that the Phillip Island centipede population can kill and eat between 2,109 and 3,724 petrel chicks each year. The black-winged petrels — of which there are up to 19,000 breeding pairs on the island — appear to be resilient to this level of predation.

Envenomation of a black-winged petrel nestling by a Phillip Island centipede. (Video by Daniel Terrington)

And the predation of black-winged petrels by Phillip Island centipedes is an entirely natural predator-prey relationship. By preying on vertebrates, the centipedes trap nutrients brought from the ocean by seabirds and distribute them around the island.

In some sense, they’ve taken the place (or ecological niche) of predatory mammals, which are absent from the island.

Luke Halpin monitoring black-winged petrel chicks on Phillip Island.

 Trudy Chatwin

Restoration and recovery

Up until just a few decades ago the Phillip Island Centipede was very rare. In fact, it was only formally described as a species in 1984.

After an intensive search in 1980, only a few small individuals were found. The species’s rarity back then was most likely due to severely degraded habitats caused by pigs, goats and rabbits introduced by humans to the island.

The removal of these invasive pests enabled black-winged petrels to colonise. Their population has since exploded and they’re now the most abundant of the 13 seabird species that breed on Phillip Island.

They provide a high-quality food source for the Phillip Island centipede and have therefore likely helped centipede population to recover.

Black-winged petrels on Phillip Island are active both during the day and at night. 

(Video by Luke Halpin)

Ancient bone deposits in the soil suggest that prior to the black-winged petrel’s arrival, Phillip Island was home to large numbers of other small burrow-nesting seabird species. It’s likely the Phillip Island centipede preyed on these seabirds too.

Now, thanks to the conservation efforts of Norfolk Island National Park, the island’s forest is regenerating alongside endemic species like the centipede, as well as the critically endangered Phillip Island hibiscus (Hibiscus insularis)

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The endemic Phillip Island hibiscus. Luke Halpin

As a driver of nutrient transfer, the persistence of the Phillip Island centipede (and its healthy appetite) might just be key to the island’s ecosystem recovery. But we’ll need to do more research to fully understand the intricate links in this bustling food web.

Authors

Luke Halpin
Ecologist, Monash University

Rohan Clarke
Director, Monash Drone Discovery Platform, and Senior Lecturer in Ecology, Monash University

Rowan Mott
Biologist, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Luke Halpin is a recipient of the Endeavour Postgraduate Leadership Award from the Australian Government. This research was funded by the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment – Equity Trustees Charitable Foundation & the Ecological Society of Australia, BirdLife Australia Stuart Leslie Bird Research Award and the Australasian Seabird Group. Support was also provided by the New South Wales Department of Planning, Industry and Environment and Norfolk Island National Park.

Rohan Clarke receives funding from Parks Australia, the Australia and the Pacific Science Foundation. Rohan Clarke is affiliated with Monash University.

Rowan Mott is affiliated with the University of Adelaide.
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CUE THE ALIEN CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Curiosity Rover Sees a Weird Martian Rock Formation
By Isaac Schultz

The unusual formation, imaged by Curiosity rover’s Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) in July 2021.Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

Not to be outdone by the young upstart Perseverance, NASA’s Curiosity rover has spent recent days imaging interesting rocks at the base of Mount Sharp on Mars, near which the rover landed in August 2012. One of those features is an arch, similar to some of the towering geology present on parts of Earth—but this arch is only about 6.5 inches tall.

Raw images of the arch taken late last week were recently made available on Curiosity’s image portal. The structure is located in Mars’ Gale Crater, which is a nearly 4-billion-year-old meteor impact site that likely held water at some point in its ancient history, based on the clay and sulfate mineral deposits located in it.

At the Martian mountain’s base, Curiosity came across a formation unique enough to pique the interest of NASA scientists. They had the rover inspect the rock up close using the Chemistry and Camera tool, or ChemCam, which can image rocks and unpack their chemical composition, and its Mast Camera, which takes pictures of the terrain.

The rock arch sits unassumingly on the floor of Gale Crater. It’s prominent on the otherwise flat terrain around it and is a bit offset, with one side of the arch meeting the other slightly below its acme. It would look peculiar even on Earth. Commentators on social media said the formation looks like a cat on a jet ski or a serpent’s spine. If you look in the arch’s negative space, it appears a bit like a squashed map of Great Britain.

The weird rock (bottom left).Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Whatever you see, the rock texture is a “particularly whimsical” example of the terrain in the area, Abigail Fraeman, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in a recent blog post.

Perseverance, the newer Martian rover, has upgraded instruments compared to Curiosity, but this rock is about as far from Perseverance as New York City is from Los Angeles, so our odds of seeing it in better detail are next to nothing. Years from now, though, NASA plans to send a spacecraft to bring Martian rocks to Earth. Perseverance will be collecting and storing caches of samples for eventual retrieval, one of the most ambitious science objectives to date in space. Those Martian rocks will be the farthest objects in the solar system to be retrieved by humankind.


More: The Weirdest Images Ever Taken on Mars

 

COVID ‘Fast Grants’ sped up pandemic science

Programme awarded $US50 million in rapid grants and 

highlights limitations in existing scientific-funding mechanisms.

• Holly Else

Fast Grant recipient Lisa Gralinski, a virologist at the Gillings School of Global Public Health in North Carolina, is studying drugs to treat COVID-19.Credit: Christopher Janaro/Bloomberg/Getty

What happened when an economics researcher, a bioengineer and a tech entrepreneur joined forces in a pandemic? They envisaged a research-grant system with an application form that can be completed in less than 30 minutes, a decision-making process that takes just 48 hours, and funding that arrives within a week — and then set up the system in 10 days, using donations from philanthropists.

The scheme, known as Fast Grants, launched in April 2020 and received 4,000 applications in its first week. It was created by Tyler Cowen, an economics researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia; Patrick Collison, co-founder of online payment processing platform, Stripe; and Patrick Hsu, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Now the trio have released the results of a survey about how the speedy funding benefited scientists’ work in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and how traditional routes of funding may be overly bureaucratic.

Lethargic response

The conventional process of securing research funding typically takes more than a year; even fast-track schemes can take months. The institutional response to the pandemic “has been lethargic”, write the trio in a blog post about the scheme. They note that in early 2020, they “expected the U.S.’s immense government funding systems to be unleashed, with decisions made in days if not in hours. This is what happened during World War II, which killed fewer Americans.”

Instead, Tyler, Collison and Hsu found that leading scientists were “stuck on hold”, waiting for permission from funders to repurpose projects to tackle COVID-19.

In response, they set up Fast Grants, securing more than US$50 million from donors. By the end of 2020, they had issued 260 grants, mostly to labs in the United States, but also in Japan, Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Projects were awarded across many topics. One supported research that found saliva swabs worked just as well as nasopharyngeal swabs did for SARS-CoV-2 tests. Others tracked viral variants of concern before the advent of genomic surveillance systems, and identified misfired immune responses in people with severe COVID-19.

According to a survey of 80 of the grant recipients, 67% said their research wouldn’t have been possible without a fast grant, and about a third said it accelerated their work by months.

The data shows that “our current grant system is too slow, too restrictive and inflexible”, says Cowen, who is also the director of Fast Grants. However, he acknowledges the existing system has achieved a lot in battling COVID, for example much of the work on mRNA vaccines has been funded by US National Institute of Health grants.

Shahar Avin, a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, UK, agrees, saying that the interest in the scheme and the survey results suggest there is “significant untapped potential for research”. But one important question to be answered is whether the Fast Grants projects “generate results that are as high in quality and impact as more traditional streams”, he says.

Some studies actually suggest that these types of fast projects can have a greater impact than those funded through more conventional, slower, routes1.

The speed of the Fast Grants application and approval process was possible thanks to an innovative review system . A group of 20 early career researchers from different institutions vetted the more than 6000 proposals submitted by laboratory heads. At least three reviewers read each application, and funding was awarded if one or two reviewers, at least, thought it was very worthy of funding.

While the approval process took less than 48 hours initially, it later took up to two weeks in some cases, once the scheme became more popular.

Huge drain on time

Normally, grant applications pass through the hands of tens of reviewers. At the US National Institutes of Health, for example, funded proposals typically go through three phases of review and are appraised by 10–20 scientists and programme officers in total.

More than 55% of those who replied to the Fast Grants survey said they spent more than one-quarter of their working hours putting together grant applications, highlighting how conventional mechanisms are a huge drain on researchers’ time (see ‘Poor use of time’).

“This seems crazy. We spend enormous effort training scientists who are then forced to spend a significant fraction of their time seeking alms instead of focusing on the research they’ve been hired to pursue,” write Cowen, Collison and Hsu.

When asked how having unconstrained, permanent funding would affect their science, almost 80% of respondents said it would change their research programme a lot (see ‘Funding restraints’). The top changes they cited included making projects more ambitious, working outside their usual field and pursuing hypotheses that others thought to be unlikely or lacking in merit.

Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, says that governmental funding routes are time-consuming and cautious because taxpayers’ money is being spent. “Public funders have a much lower tolerance for failure, which results in a more conservative and rigorous peer-reviewed approach,” she says.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02111-7

References

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   Guthrie, S., Ghiga, I. & Wooding, S. F1000Research 6, 1335 (2018).

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