Friday, February 14, 2025

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

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A schematic diagram of the dissolution and analysis setup. Clays were dissolved in sodium hydroxide solutions for 1-15 minutes. The solution samples were then filtered, diluted and analyzed with standard methods using the spectrophotometer and camera-based method developed in this study.

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Credit: Graphic courtesy Nishant Garg and Cement and Concrete Research.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

Due to declining coal production, traditional SCMs like coal-based fly ashes are in short supply. One promising alternative is newer SCMs like calcined clays, which can partially replace ordinary Portland cement and result in durable, low-cost concrete that produces less carbon dioxide during production.

The study, led by civil and environmental engineering professor Nishant Garg, uses a low-cost analysis called colorimetry and camera technology for real-time quality control of calcined clays in industrial settings. Calcined clays are SCMs that contain aluminum- and silicon-containing minerals that become chemically reactive when heated to 600 to 900 degrees Celsius.

The study findings are published in the journal Cement and Concrete Research, and Garg’s team is enthusiastic to connect with other research teams and industry partners working in this area.

After heat treatment, the aluminum and silicon in calcined clays become very chemically reactive, which allows them to contribute to the reactions that lead to long-term strengthening in mortar and concrete. The level of reactivity can be measured, and researchers can use this to predict the product’s final strength and quality.

“There are testing methodologies currently in place for measuring the chemical reactivity of the aluminum and silicon in calcined clays, but they require expensive testing equipment and consume a lot of laboratory time,” said Garg, who also is affiliated with the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment. “Our new test can be run on the fly by the people working in the plant for real-time quality control. Our technique introduces an analyzer that can be used on the production line every five minutes, allowing workers to collect a small sample from their conveyor belt and quickly determine if the quality is consistent.”

In the lab, Garg’s team developed a way to measure calcined clay’s reactivity very rapidly. To do it, the researchers first expose the clay to a heated, aggressive alkaline solution for five minutes, which dissolves the clays, freeing the aluminum and silicon ions for measurement. “We spent quite a bit of time optimizing the alkalinity and temperature of our solution so that it can be done in minutes rather than hours or days like the conventional tests currently available,” Garg said.

Once the solution was ready, the researchers measured the concentration of aluminum and silicon ions dissolved in the solution and then combined those values into a single dissolution index. “And this is where our new approach becomes exciting,” Garg said. “We found that instead of sending these solutions off to a lab to be analyzed using expensive analytical equipment, we could simply add a coloring agent to the solution that reacts with the ions to produce distinct colors depending on the concentrations of aluminum and silicon. We can then quantify the color using a low-cost colorimeter, which is a device that measures how much light a solution absorbs at a specific wavelength.”

The team ran many experiments to calibrate the colors corresponding to the clay solution’s aluminum and silicon concentrations. With increasing concentrations of aluminum and silicon, the solutions show stronger pink and blue colors, respectively, the study reports.

“Both colors are in the visible light spectrum, so we can photograph the colored solutions using a low-cost, say $30, camera, and assign the corresponding RGB values from the images to previously established calibration curves to determine the precise amount of aluminum and silicon in the solution based on color,” Garg said. “We ran statistical analysis and found that using this camera image analysis method is comparable with the results obtained using a quantitative analytical device called a UV-VIS spectrophotometer. On 47 diverse clay samples, our five-minute test strongly correlates with the seven-day industry standard test, thus enhancing speed, reducing cost and still maintaining accuracy. “

These results show that camera-based colorimetry can be used as an alternative to the absorbance at certain wavelengths for quantitative analysis, the study reports.

“This study is exciting for our team here at Illinois and the cement and concrete industry in general because of the opportunity it will present to reduce the testing time while screening for new materials and ensure consistent quality during production at a low cost,” Garg said.

Partnerships will be key to refining and implementing this technology because there are a few more hurdles to clear, Garg said.

So far, the team said the method works only for calcined clays but there are many other types of supplementary cementitious materials being considered for use in future sustainable cement and concrete mixes. Newer materials called natural pozzolans, reclaimed ashes, as well as older materials like coal fly ashes and blast furnace slags could be potential targets.

“We call on industrial producers to share samples and help us verify if our ultra-rapid test can be honed and extended to these systems so that we can predict the performance of any material in a few minutes,” Garg said. “We also call on original equipment manufacturers to help us automate the test into a commercial device.”

The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation partially supported this study. Garg and his coauthors have a pending patent application for this technology, filed through The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Office of Technology Management.

A schematic diagram of the camera method: (a) The solutions used for colorimetric analysis of aluminum. (b) The solutions used for colorimetric analysis of silicon. (c) The color range used camera-image analysis. (d) Camera images of standard solutions of aluminum and silicon with concentrations of 20, 100, 300, 500, and 700 ppb.

Credit

Graphic courtesy Nishant Garg and Cement and Concrete Research

Editor’s note:

The paper “UR2: ultra-rapid reactivity test for real-time, low-cost quality control of calcined clays” is available online. DOI: 10.1016/j.cemconres.2025.107806

Civil and environmental engineering is part of The Grainger College of Engineering.

Journal

Cement and Concrete Research

DOI

10.1016/j.cemconres.2025.107806

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

UR2: ultra-rapid reactivity test for real-time, low-cost quality control of calcined clays

Article Publication Date

11-Feb-2025

COI Statement

Yujia Min, Hossein Kabir, Chirayu Kothari, Farjad Iqbal, and Nishant Garg has patent pending to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Protected habitats aren’t enough to save endangered mammals, MSU researchers find

Michigan State University

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EAST LANSING, Mich. – Tropical forests are massive biodiversity storehouses. While these rich swathes of land constitute less than one-tenth of Earth’s surface, they harbor more than 60% of known species. Among them is a higher concentration of endangered species than anywhere else on Earth.

However, these regions are also under immense pressure, as tropical land is rapidly being transformed for industrial and agricultural purposes.

Worldwide, regional governments and international groups are establishing new protected areas to slow further loss of threatened species. However, new research appearing in the journal PLOS Biology demonstrates that this strategy may not be enough on its own to reverse, or even stop, these regions’ declining biodiversity.

Michigan State University Assistant Professor Lydia Beaudrot, an ecologist in the Department of Integrative Biology, was a key contributor to the study. Beaudrot leads a research group whose focus is on quantifying data-driven insights into the ecology and conservation of tropical mammals.

This paper brought together an international cohort of tropical wildlife researchers. Together, they assessed how tropical mammalian communities are affected by the activity of nearby humans — from the impact of simple coexistence to widespread environmental change.

“We found that tropical forests near more people have fewer mammal species. It suggests that some species do not survive even when forests are protected, such as in national parks,” Beaudrot explained.

Activities such as clear-cutting or other transformations of land present some of the most destructive threats to habitats. But even persistent human activity, including hunting and simply living adjacent to protected areas, can decrease some animals’ ability to thrive in protected zones, the authors argued.

Near the not-so-quiet village

This effect, termed “anthropogenic extinction filtering,” demonstrates that human activity outside of protected areas is dramatically reshaping the forest communities within them.

Across tropical forests spanning three continents — South America, Africa and Asia — the researchers measured how varied and dense the populations of mammals were within these regions using an unprecedented dataset comprised of over 2,000 cameras across tropical forests worldwide.

The images gathered came in part from a network of 17 sites across the tropics established as the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network which is composed of a diverse group of conservationists and research collaborators.

Ilaria Greco, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florence and lead author on the study, forged connections with an even broader international cohort of wildlife researchers to facilitate the exchange of data not included in the Wildlife Insights database. This collaboration paved the way for the largest-ever study of its kind, encompassing 37 total locations — more than double the sites available through Wildlife Insights.

This endeavor yielded long-term data on 239 species of mammals, enabling researchers to examine how these numbers changed where human population density and habitat disturbance in nearby areas differed. Sites in the study ranged from large, continuous forested regions to highly fragmented forest ecosystems.

In addition to the critical importance of protected areas, Beaudrot noted that additional conservation measures, such as forest restoration, are essential to protect tropical mammals.

The researchers developed a model that integrated remote-sensing data — information gathered from aerial imagery — with images from trail cameras to better understand how human presence impacted mammal communities in protected areas.

“Through a massive collaboration among many researchers, we used the largest dataset to date to test how habitat loss and human density affect tropical forest wildlife,” Beaudrot said.

The model predicted that for every 16 humans within a square kilometer of a protected area, mammal species could decrease by as much as 1%.

Where the buffer zone for these protected areas is negligible, the activity along their edges can reshape forest communities.

Land change in tropical forests means that nearly 70% of tropical forest habitats are within one kilometer of a forest’s edge — where interactions with humans or infrastructure becomes likely.

Mammal communities were also negatively impacted by forest loss and fragmentation within 50 kilometers, or about 31 miles, of their forested habitats.

“It is not just the protected area that matters for biodiversity conservation but also what is outside the protected area,” Beaudrot said.

Unprecedented understanding

“Until recently, we have not had high-quality data at a global scale to measure how people affect the number of mammal species and how widely they occur within tropical forests,” Beaudrot said.

This research provides the most comprehensive picture to date of how human activity contributes to declining biodiversity in some of the most species-rich regions of the world.

While protected areas are critically important for conservation, the existence of protected areas on their own may not be enough to guarantee that threatened and endangered species are able to survive.

Current initiatives, including the United Nations’ Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which are meant to stop or reverse human-caused extinction and ecosystem destruction, may fall short of these goals, the authors warned.

Therefore, to create more effective protected areas, the authors suggested that reducing the effects of humans outside protected area borders is critical. They note that restoring habitat outside the protected areas widens the zone between humans and tropical mammals, helping bolster biodiversity.

Rather than protecting isolated patches of land, the authors noted that tropical mammals may stand a better chance if protected areas become more widespread and connected, creating broader uninterrupted regions for animals to persist in.

Greco, who led the project and is a former visiting scholar in Beaudrot’s lab, now works as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Francesco Rovero, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Florence and a long-time collaborator of Beaudrot’s.

According to Greco, the team’s results suggest the existence of “anthropogenic extinction filtering acting on mammals in tropical forests, whereby human overpopulation has driven the most sensitive species to local extinction while remaining ones are able to persist, or even thrive, in highly populated landscapes and mainly depend on habitat cover.”

“The study warns that conservation of many mammals in tropical forests depends on mitigating the complex detrimental effects of anthropogenic pressures well beyond protected area borders,” said Rovero.

This study was first published on Feb. 13 in PLOS Biology. Parts of this story have been adapted from a release prepared by the journal.

By Caleb Hess

###

Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for 170 years. One of the world’s leading public research universities, MSU pushes the boundaries of discovery to make a better, safer, healthier world for all while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 400 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.

For MSU news on the web, go to MSUToday or x.com/MSUnews.

Journal

PLOS Biology

Article Publication Date

13-Feb-2025

Birds have developed complex brains independently from mammals

Science publishes two studies led by an Ikerbasque researcher at Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience and UPV/EHU that reveal their unique evolution

University of the Basque Country

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Chick embryo after experimental manipulation
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Credit: Fernando García-Moreno

The pallium is the brain region where the neocortex forms in mammals, the part responsible for cognitive and complex functions that most distinguishes humans from other species. The pallium has traditionally been considered a comparable structure among mammals, birds, and reptiles, varying only in complexity levels. It was assumed that this region housed similar neuronal types, with equivalent circuits for sensory and cognitive processing. Previous studies had identified the presence of shared excitatory and inhibitory neurons, as well as general connectivity patterns suggesting a similar evolutionary path in these vertebrate species. However, the new studies have revealed that, although the general functions of the pallium are equivalent among these groups, its developmental mechanisms and the molecular identity of its neurons have diverged substantially throughout evolution.

The first study, conducted by Eneritz Rueda-Alaña and Fernando García-Moreno at Achucarro, with the support of a multidisciplinary team of collaborators from the Basque research centers CICbioGUNE and BCAM, the Madrid-based CNIC, the University of Murcia, Krembil (Canada), and Stockholm University, shows that while birds and mammals have developed circuits with similar functions, the way these circuits form during embryonic development is radically different. "Their neurons are born in different locations and developmental times in each species," explains Dr. García-Moreno, head of the Brain Development and Evolution laboratory, "indicating that they are not comparable neurons derived from a common ancestor." Using spatial transcriptomics and mathematical modeling, the researchers found that the neurons responsible for sensory processing in birds and mammals are formed using different sets of genes. "The genetic tools they use to establish their cellular identity vary from species to species, each exhibiting new and unique cell types." This all indicates that these structures and circuits are not homologous, but rather the result of convergent evolution, meaning that "they have independently developed these essential neural circuits through different evolutionary paths."

The second study further explores these differences. Conducted at Heidelberg University (Germany) and co-directed by Bastienne Zaremba, Henrik Kaessmann, and Fernando García-Moreno, it provides a detailed cell type atlas of the avian brain and compares it with those of mammals and reptiles. "We were able to describe the hundreds of genes that each type of neuron uses in these brains, cell by cell, and compare them with bioinformatics tools." The results show that birds have retained most inhibitory neurons present in all other vertebrates for hundreds of millions of years. However, their excitatory neurons, responsible for transmitting information in the pallium, have evolved in a unique way. Only a few neuronal types in the avian brain were identified with genetic profiles similar to those found in mammals, such as the claustrum and the hippocampus, suggesting that some neurons are very ancient and shared across species. "However, most excitatory neurons have evolved in new and different ways in each species," details Dr. García-Moreno.

The studies, published in Science, used advanced techniques in spatial transcriptomics, developmental neurobiology, single-cell analysis, and mathematical modeling to trace the evolution of brain circuits in birds, mammals, and reptiles.

Rewriting the Evolutionary History of the Brain

"Our studies show that evolution has found multiple solutions for building complex brains," explains Dr. García-Moreno. "Birds have developed sophisticated neural circuits through their own mechanisms, without following the same path as mammals. This changes how we understand brain evolution."

These findings highlight the evolutionary flexibility of brain development, demonstrating that advanced cognitive functions can emerge through vastly different genetic and cellular pathways.

The importance of studying brain evolution

"Our brain makes us human, but it also binds us to other animal species through a shared evolutionary history," explains Dr. García-Moreno. The discovery that birds and mammals have developed neural circuits independently has major implications for comparative neuroscience. Understanding the different genetic programs that give rise to specific neuronal types could open new avenues for research in neurodevelopment. Dr. García-Moreno advocates for this type of fundamental research: "Only by understanding how the brain forms, both in its embryonic development and in its evolutionary history, can we truly grasp how it functions."

References:

Rueda-Alaña E, Senovilla-Ganzo R, Grillo M, Vázquez E, Marco-Salas S, Gallego-Flores T, Ftara A, Escobar L, Benguría A, Quintas A, Dopazo A, Rábano M, dM Vivanco M, Aransay AM, Garrigos D, Toval A, Ferrán JL, Nilsson M, Encinas JM, De Pitta M, García-Moreno F (2025). Evolutionary convergence of sensory circuits in the pallium of amniotes. Science (in press). doi: 10.1126/science.adp3411
Zaremba B, Fallahshahroudi A, Schneider C, Schmidt J, Sarropoulos I, Leushkin E, Berki B, Van Poucke E, Jensen P, Senovilla-Ganzo R, Hervas-Sotomayor F, Trost N, Lamanna F, Sepp M, García-Moreno F, Kaessmann H (2025). Developmental origins and evolution of pallial cell types and structures in birds. Science (in press). doi: 10.1126/science.adp5182

www.phylobrain.org

Distribution of the different neuron types in the chick brain (black background)