Rice University scientists launch powerful new online tool to streamline mineral identification

MIST opens new ways of working with big data in exploration, mineral databases

Rice University

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The MIST team, from left to right, Yueyang Jiang, Kirsten Siebach, Gelu Costin and Eleanor Moreland (Photo credit: Linda Fries/Rice University).

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Credit: Linda Fries/Rice University

Identifying a mineral might sound straightforward: analyze its chemistry, compare it to known minerals and voilà. But for geologists, this process can be a time-consuming puzzle requiring specialized expertise and a lot of manual calculation.

Now, a team of researchers at Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences has developed MIST — Mineral Identification by Stoichiometry — the first online tool capable of automatically identifying hundreds of different mineral species from their chemical composition using a carefully designed rules-based algorithm.

The best part? It’s free for anyone to use.

“MIST takes a tedious, expertise-heavy process and makes it accessible in seconds,” said Kirsten Siebach, assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences and lead author of the study recently published in Computers and Geosciences. “You don’t have to already know what mineral you’re looking at — MIST can figure it out from the chemistry.”

In fact, Siebach said the idea for MIST came from the anticipation of receiving blind scan data from Mars ripe with possibilities of unexpected minerals.

“We didn’t want to only look for minerals we expected,” Siebach said. “We wanted to be able to quickly recognize minerals whether we anticipated them or not.”

Mineral identification matters far beyond the lab. The chemical makeup of minerals holds clues about the geologic conditions that formed them, from the depths of Earth’s mantle to the surface of Mars. Traditionally, researchers using techniques like electron probe microanalysis had to normalize chemical data, calculate “atoms per formula unit” and compare element ratios to hundreds of possible minerals — a process that could involve dozens of spreadsheets and years of experience. MIST simplifies the process and has applications for geologists, planetary geologists and even the energy industry.

“MIST was born out of the need to speed up that workflow,” said Eleanor Moreland, co-author and Rice graduate student. “We wanted something that didn’t require users to pick a starting mineral group or know the number of oxygens in advance. You just feed in the oxide data, and MIST does the rest.”

Rather than relying on machine learning or database lookups, MIST uses a hierarchical, rules-based classification system grounded in verified mineral formulas from the RRUFF mineral database. The algorithm compares the stoichiometric ratios in a sample to known compositions, accounting for the natural substitutions and vacancies found in real minerals.

“MIST embraces the fact that nature is messy,” Siebach said. “Minerals in the real world don’t always match the textbook formula — you might find extra sodium, a little potassium where it fits in or elements swapping places. MIST accounts for those natural imperfections, which makes its identifications more accurate.”

If MIST finds a match, it outputs the mineral species name, a precise recalculated formula and even mineral “endmembers” — key descriptors used in geology, like the Fo (forsterite) or Fa (fayalite) content of olivine. If no exact match is found, it can still identify the broader mineral class, providing a starting point for further analysis.

“MIST doesn’t just say ‘this is close to augite’ — it tells you exactly why,” said Gelu Costin, co-author, research scientist and lab manager of the Electron Probe Microanalyzer Laboratory (EPMA) at Rice. “It shows the intermediate calculations, the formula and whether the composition passes strict stoichiometric checks.”

In the future, MIST could be directly integrated with analytical instruments for mineral and rock chemistry, making all of those calculations available immediately.

To see how well MIST performs, the team fed it data from a coarse-grained igneous rock from South Africa’s Bushveld Complex. Of the 225 EPMA measurements taken, MIST correctly identified 199 mineral points — including diopside, augite, plagioclase and anhydrite — and declined to name the rest when the data didn’t match any species.

“That’s exactly what you want from an automated system,” Moreland said. “It shouldn’t guess when the chemistry doesn’t fit. MIST knows when to say, ‘This isn’t a valid match.’”

Even before the paper describing MIST was published online, it was already gaining popularity through word of mouth.

“We made the model available online through our website before publication, and we had more than 50 users register from around the world before we even finished the paper,” Siebach said.

One of MIST’s biggest impacts may be in cleaning and labeling massive mineral databases for use in machine learning. The team used it to filter over a million analyses in the GEOROC geochemical database, standardizing 875,000 natural mineral records into a format ready for training AI models or large-scale geologic studies.

“This is a huge step for geoscience data science,” Siebach said. “Machine learning is only as good as the data you feed it, and MIST helps make sure that data is accurate and consistent.”

The tool, available at mist.rice.edu, is already being used for planetary science applications, including analyzing chemical data from NASA’s Mars rovers.

“MIST started as a way to help interpret minerals on Mars,” Siebach said. “But it’s turning out to be just as valuable for rocks here on Earth.”

This work was supported by NASA.

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Journal

Computers & Geosciences

DOI

10.1016/j.cageo.2025.106021 

Article Title

MIST: An Online Tool Automating Mineral Identification by Stoichiometry

Article Publication Date

15-Aug-2025

Researchers use electrochemistry to boost nuclear fusion rates​​​​

SCI-FI-TEK 70YRS IN THE MAKING

University of British Columbia

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The Thunderbird Reactor is a custom-made, bench-top-sized particle accelerator and electrochemical reactor built by an interdisciplinary team at the University of British Columbia.

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Credit: University of British Columbia, Berlinguette Lab.

Using a small bench-top reactor, researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have demonstrated that electrochemically loading a solid metal target with deuterium fuel can boost nuclear fusion rates.  

Large-scale magnetic confinement fusion—which puts plasmas under extreme temperatures and pressure—is being widely explored as a method for clean energy generation. The experiment published today in Nature takes an entirely different approach—with a more accessible, room-temperature reactor used to study the effect of electrochemical loading on nuclear fusion reaction rates. 

The team loaded a metal target made of palladium with high concentrations of deuterium fuel—on one side of the target, using a plasma field to load the fuel, and on the other, using an additional electrochemical cell to load the fuel. 

“The goal is to increase fuel density and the probability of deuterium–deuterium collisions, and as a result, fusion events,” explains Professor Curtis P. Berlinguette, corresponding author of the paper and Distinguished University Scholar at UBC.  

“Using electrochemistry, we loaded much more deuterium into the metal—like squeezing fuel into a sponge. One volt of electricity achieved what normally requires 800 atmospheres of pressure. While we didn’t achieve net energy gain, the approach boosted fusion rates in a way other researchers can reproduce and build on.” 

The electrochemical loading of deuterium into the palladium target increased deuterium–deuterium fusion rates by an average of 15 per cent compared to loading the target palladium using the plasma field alone. 

While the performance boost is modest, it’s the first demonstration of deuterium–deuterium nuclear fusion using these techniques—plasma immersion ion implantation and electrochemical loading. The experiment still used more energy than it created. 

“We hope this work helps bring fusion science out of the giant national labs and onto the lab bench,” adds Professor Berlinguette. “Our approach brings together nuclear fusion, materials science, and electrochemistry to create a platform where both fuel-loading methods and target materials can be systematically tuned. We see this as a starting point—one that invites the community to iterate, refine, and build upon in the spirit of open and rigorous inquiry.” 

Nuclear fusion — energy released from combining atomic nuclei, as occurs in the sun — is more powerful than fission (splitting nuclei) and creates less dangerous radioactive waste. 

The Thunderbird Reactor 

The Thunderbird Reactor is a bespoke bench-top-sized particle accelerator designed to electrochemically enhance deuterium-deuterium nuclear fusion rates. The three main components of the reactor are a plasma thruster, a vacuum chamber, and an electrochemical cell.  

Earlier experiments 

The first demonstration of deuterium–deuterium nuclear fusion dates to 1934, when researchers bombarded a target of solid metal, plated with deuterated material, with high-energy deuterium ions. 

In 1989, researchers claimed that anomalous heat was generated during the electrolysis of deuterium oxide using a palladium cathode—attributing the heat to the nuclear fusion of deuterium ions. The result could not be independently validated and cold fusion research was effectively banished from mainstream science. The new experiment did not measure heat – it measured hard nuclear signatures like neutrons, which are direct evidence of fusion. 

Professor Berlinguette and his team’s most recent work builds upon their work with a previous multi-institutional “peer group” that was convened and funded by Google in 2015 to re-evaluate cold fusion. The peer group went public with their efforts through a Nature Perspective in 2019 titled “Revisiting the Cold Case of Cold Fusion”. They found no evidence to support cold fusion claims, but identified multiple lines of inquiry that merited further exploration. 

UBC was able to continue with the project and make this discovery with the support of the Thistledown Foundation. 

The reactor combines a plasma thruster, a vacuum chamber, and an electrochemical cell designed to improve fusion rates at lower temperatures.

Credit

University of British Columbia, Berlinguette Lab

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-025-09042-7 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Electrochemical loading enhances deuterium fusion rates in a metal target

 

How flies sleep – and still manage to escape

Charité study in Nature uncovers fundamental processes in the fly brain

Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin

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Drosophila (also known as fruit fly) in the laboratory © NeuroCure | 2470.media

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Credit: © NeuroCure | 2470.media

Flies too need their sleep. In order to be able to react to dangers, however, they must not completely phase out the environment. Researchers at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have now deciphered how the animal's brain produces this state. As they describe in the journal Nature*, the fly brain filters out visual information rhythmically during sleep – so that strong visual stimuli could still wake the animal up.

Periods of rest and sleep are vital – presumably for all animals. "Sleep is essential for physical regeneration, and in humans and many animals it is also fundamental for memory formation," explains Prof. David Owald, a scientist at Charité's Institute of Neurophysiology and head of the recently published study. It was previously unclear how an organism reduces its response to stimuli sufficiently to be able to regenerate, while still remaining alert enough to respond to external dangers.

A team headed by David Owald has now investigated this question using the model organism Drosophila. Due to their small brains, these two-and-a-half millimeter insects commonly known as fruit flies, are very well suited for studying neurological processes. "We have discovered that the brain of flies finely attunes activating and inhibitory networks during sleep," says David Owald. "This creates a filter that effectively suppresses visual stimuli, while particularly strong stimuli may pass through. The condition is comparable to a window ajar: The draught, in other words the transmission of stimuli, is interrupted, but a strong gust of wind can push the window open, and likewise a strong stimulus can wake the animal up."

An inhibitory neuronal network overlays the activating one

According to the study, the flies become tired in the evening, after a long period of wakefulness and following the rhythm of the internal clock: Slow, synchronous electrical waves – so-called slow waves – are generated in two different brain networks that connect visual stimuli with brain regions required for navigation – one activates and the other inhibits the response to visual stimuli. "If both networks are active at the same time, the inhibitory network wins and the processing of the stimuli is blocked," explains Dr. Davide Raccuglia, first author of the study from the Institute of Neurophysiology at Charité. "So the fly gently phases out its surroundings and is able to fall asleep."

In order to be woken up, however, it must be possible to break through this sleep filter. "We believe that this is enabled by the rhythmic fluctuations of the electrical waves," as Davide Raccuglia stated. This is because the slow waves are due to the fact that the electrical voltage of the nerve cells oscillates up and down once per second. "It is possible that when the voltage is high, there is a short period of time during which information can pass through the sleep filter," adds Dr. Raquel Suaréz-Grimalt, who is also first author of the study. She conducted the work at the Institute of Neurophysiology at Charité and is now working at Freie Universität Berlin. "During this period, strong visual stimuli could overcome the subtle dominance of the inhibitory brain network, in a sense opening the window so that the fly reacts."

Like flies so do humans?

According to the researchers, the slow waves create windows through which intense stimuli could wake up a sleeping fly. Sleep in humans is also characterized by slow waves. Is it possible that our brain balances periods of rest and attention according to the same principle? "In humans, we know of a structure in the brain that filters stimulus information and is involved in shaping oscillatory activity – which is the thalamus," says David Owald. "Consequently, there could be parallels here to the processes in the fly brain, so this could actually reflect a universal principle of sleep. However, further investigations will be required to prove this."

 

About the study
The study was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the European Research Council (ERC). It was carried out as part of the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence and the Einstein Center for Neurosciences, in cooperation with researchers at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

*Raccuglia D, Suárez-Grimalt R et al. Network synchrony creates neural filters promoting quiescence in Drosophila. Nature 2025 Aug 20. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09376-2

Research on fruit flies at Charité © NeuroCure | 2470.media

Credit

© NeuroCure | 2470.media

The brain of a fruit fly, which consists of a total of around 150,000 nerve cells. Some of them are marked in pink, nerve cell connections are shown in green. © Charité | Anatoli Ender

Credit

© Charité | Anatoli Ender

Sleep filter in the fly brain (blue): The visual stimuli are filtered out in the pink ring structure so that the animal can sleep. © Charité | Anatoli Ender

Credit

© Charité | Anatoli Ender

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-025-09376-2 

Article Title

Network synchrony creates neural filters promoting quiescence in Drosophila

Article Publication Date

20-Aug-2025

 

When punishers profit, people are more likely to break the rules

UC San Diego researchers show that paying enforcers to punish makes people less likely to cooperate with others, which has major implications for law-enforcement quotas, asset forfeiture, and for-profit prisons

University of California - San Diego

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Why do people cooperate with each other and follow society's rules — and what happens when those who enforce the rules stand to profit from doing so? A new study from the University of California San Diego Rady School of Management researchers tackles this fundamental question and reveals that cooperation breaks down when punishment becomes profitable.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study by Tage Rai, assistant professor of psychology at the Rady School and Raihan Alam, a Rady School doctoral student in management, finds that when people get paid to punish others, it actually makes everyone less likely to cooperate — even those who would gain from working together.

The findings have broad implications for the structure of criminal justice policies, particularly those involving private, for-profit prisons, quota-based policing, and civil asset forfeiture — when law enforcement seizes property believed to be connected to criminal activity, even without charging or convicting the owner of a crime.

When Punishment Becomes a Business

At the core of the study is a twist on a classic behavioral experiment. In a series of online economic games with more than 4,000 participants, the subjects were assigned one of three roles: a “decision-maker” a “community member,” or a “third-party punisher.” The “decision-maker” received a sum of money and could choose to share it with the “community member” or keep it all.

The “punisher” observed the “decision-maker’s” choice to keep or share money and could penalize them by reducing their payout. In previous research using the “classic” version of the game , introducing punishers increases cooperation.

“This has often been taken as a model for how law-abiding societies come to exist,” Rai said. “But when researchers look at real-world crime data, they find that severe punishment doesn’t deter crime. That creates a puzzle for scientists — so we asked ‘what dynamic is happening in the world that isn’t being captured in the lab?’”

And so the authors added a twist to the classic game. “In the real world, punishers often have incentives to punish that may erode trust in them, and so we moved that dynamic into the lab by giving punishers a bonus payment every time they punished,”Rai said.

What the researchers found is that when they made punishment profitable, they reversed the classic effect — cooperation declined after punishment was introduced, and social norms began to break down.

“When punishment was profitable, people were less likely to cooperate from the start,” Alam said. “For example, ‘decision makers’ were more likely to keep all the money, acting in their own self-interest.”

Even when researchers optimized the conditions so that punishment only ever targeted selfish behavior, cooperation failed to recover, suggesting that the initial damage to trust persisted.

Alam added that this shift in perspective eroded the very cooperative norms that punishment is supposed to uphold.

“They viewed the whole situation differently — not as a social interaction about fairness, but as a game of maximizing how much you made,” he said. “And they didn’t trust the punishers’ motives.”

Implications for Criminal Justice Reform

The study provides insight into real-world dynamics that plague the criminal justice system — particularly in communities that have long distrusted law enforcement.

“Punishment only works as a social signal if people believe it’s being done for the right reasons,” said Rai. “But in many real-world situations — like civil asset forfeiture, arrest quotas, or private prisons — the person being punished may assume that the enforcer is acting out of self-interest. And when that trust is broken, punishment backfires.”

This breakdown helps explain why efforts to reduce crime through harsher penalties or increased policing often fail to deliver results. Instead, they may create feedback loops where distrust leads to non-cooperation, which in turn justifies even more aggressive enforcement.

Even more striking, the study found that people’s attitudes toward punishment shifted depending on whether they imagined themselves as being at risk. When participants viewed punishment from a distance — seeing others as the ones who might be punished instead of themselves — they were more trusting of punishers and tended to support harsher penalties, even when the punisher stood to profit. But when participants imagined themselves as the ones who might be punished, they became more skeptical. They were less trusting of punishers and worried about being treated fairly.

“Even when we told participants that punishers were being paid, those who weren’t at risk still believed harsher punishment would boost cooperation,” said Rai. “They trusted the punishers too much and failed to consider how it might feel to be on the receiving end. I think that speaks to why voters often back ‘tough on crime’ policies. They don’t take the perspective of the communities most affected or realize how those policies may actually backfire, especially in communities where trust in authorities is already low.”

The Path Forward: Rebuilding Trust

One key takeaway from the study is that changing behavior isn’t just about changing outcomes — it’s about signaling intent.

“Even perfect enforcement doesn’t work if the underlying trust isn’t there,” said Rai. “You need structural reforms that clearly and publicly remove profit motives from punishment. People need to see — and believe — that enforcers are acting morally, not opportunistically.”

That could mean eliminating quota systems, ending civil asset forfeiture practices, or banning for-profit incarceration. It may also mean rethinking the role of punishment altogether.

“When people don’t trust the institutions that punish them, they’re less likely to follow the rules,” Rai added.

Making the Case in the Lab

Though based on online experiments, the study with thousands of participants used real monetary incentives to simulate real-world stakes.

“These economic games allow us to strip away pre-existing attitudes people may have on law-enforcement and the legal system and look closely at how people respond when punishment becomes monetized,” said Alam. “It’s a powerful way to measure behavior under controlled conditions.”

The authors conclude that the findings help explain not only the failures of some justice policies, but the persistent misperceptions that allow those policies to continue. As debates over police reform, incarceration, and community safety continue, they argue that this work provides compelling evidence that trust — not punishment — is the foundation of any cooperative society.

Ready the full paper, "Profitable Third-Party Punishment Destabilizes Cooperation."

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Profitable Third-Party Punishment Destabilizes Cooperation

Article Publication Date

19-Aug-2025

 

Falling water forms beautiful fluted films

King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST)

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Using hollow tubes of varying diameters and high-speed imaging, KAUST researchers captured the hidden shapes of the thin liquid film left behind after water flowed out. © 2025 KAUST.

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Credit: © 2025 KAUST

When water drains from the bottom of a vertical tube, it is followed by a thin film of liquid that can adopt complex and beautiful shapes. KAUST researchers have now studied exactly how these “fluted films” form and break up, developing a mathematical model of their behavior that could help improve the performance, safety, and efficiency of industrial processes[1]

“At first glance, water draining from a tube seems like an everyday process driven by gravity,” says Abhijit Kushwaha, a member of the team behind the work. “It is only with high-speed imaging that we can slow down time enough to capture the hidden choreography of this process.”

For the study, the team used hollow tubes of varying diameters, filled with water to different heights. As the researchers allowed the water to flow out, a high-speed camera captured the shapes formed over a period of about a hundred milliseconds.

This revealed a curious effect for certain combinations of tube diameter and water height. As the liquid fell, a thin film of water dragged against the tube walls and descended more slowly. Once the main water column exited the tube, this film emerged and formed a fleeting, tulip-shaped bubble. In some cases, the fluted film quickly retracted into the tube; in others, it stretched until the water column broke away from it.

The formation of fluted films depends on a delicate balance of gravity, surface tension, inertia, and viscosity, explains Kushwaha. If the water column is too short or the tube is too narrow, the film does not form. Conversely, the widest tubes produce a cylindrical film that breaks away from the tube to create a crown shape.

The researchers created a mathematical model to predict the behavior of these films based on a few simple parameters, such as tube radius and water height. “This can inform better design and control strategies in any system where thin liquid films play a vital role — from industrial reactors to microelectronics to biological systems, such as the lungs,” explains Tadd Truscott, who leads the research.

For example, devices called falling-film evaporators are widely used in industries like food processing, pharmaceuticals, and power generation to concentrate liquids or remove solvents. These systems feature thin films of liquid that evaporate as they flow down the walls of heated tubes. If these films break or become uneven, heat transfer efficiency can be reduced, or equipment can be damaged.

“Our research helps improve understanding of when and how such films might rupture or behave unexpectedly, offering insights that could be used to design more reliable systems,” Truscott says. “This could also be relevant to cooling rocket engines or applying protective coatings to surfaces.”

The team plans to study how other fluids behave in a broader range of tubes. “Ultimately, our goal is to develop a predictive framework that helps scientists and engineers understand, design, and optimize systems where thin films play a hidden but crucial role,” Kushwaha adds.

Reference

1. Kushwaha, A. K., Jones, M. B., Belden, J., Speirs, N. & Truscott, T. T. Transient fluted films behind falling water columns. Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 224001 (2025). | article

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Journal

Physical Review Letters

Article Title

Transient fluted films behind falling water columns