‘Just-shoring’ puts justice at the center of critical minerals policy

The global energy transition depends on critical raw materials, but the race to secure them strains local communities and ecosystems. A new framework argues that policy must center justice for supply chain security and climate goals to succeed

University of Utah

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A clean energy future hinges on minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements. But the race to secure them puts pressure on the places where they are mined, often affecting communities contributing the least to climate change. With some supply and processing concentrated in just a few countries, these critical raw materials (CRMs) have also become a geopolitical flashpoint.

To secure CRM sources, the United States and European Union are moving supply chains to aligned regions—producing more at home, bringing industries back or moving operations to allied countries. But simply shuffling where minerals are mined does not automatically make extraction more ethical or sustainable.

In a commentary published in January in the journal Nature Energy, researchers propose a new framework of “just-shoring” to shift focus from competition and security to the rights and interests of those whose lands are most at risk.

“Right now, powerful—often Western—governments and firms are attempting to reshape the geographies of supply chains without changing the rules of extraction,” said lead author Jessica DiCarlo, human geographer and political ecologist at the University of Utah. “If we don’t rethink who benefits and who bears the costs, we risk repeating the same injustices of the fossil fuel era under a ‘green’ label.”

Shoring up supply chains

Critical raw materials power everything from wind turbines and electric vehicles to semiconductors and advanced defense systems. But mining and processing are concentrated in a few countries, making global supply chains particularly vulnerable; China, for example, dominates the mining and refining of rare earth elements.

Governments and firms typically pursue three strategies for securing independent CRM sources: On-shoring by developing new domestic operations; re-shoring by reestablishing previously offshored industries; and friend-shoring by relocating or expanding supply chains to geopolitically aligned countries. Reshuffling where CRM operations occur may yield components for green energy, but it also threatens health, air, water, biodiversity and livelihoods—with limited assessment of whether the project mitigates climate change at all.

More than half of the proposed facilities are located on or near agrarian or Indigenous land. Some frameworks, like the Paris Agreement and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, recommend a shift to local resource control, but only on a voluntary basis. Just-shoring pushes beyond best practices to make accountability and transparency enforceable, giving communities a legal right to co-govern throughout the entirety of the mineral lifecycle, from initial exploration and permitting through the final stages of closure and clean-up and recycling. It is guided by three questions: Who benefits? Whose risks are amplified? How much material extraction is necessary for a just transition?

“We cannot build a low-carbon future on sacrifice zones,” DiCarlo said. “Communities are told extraction is necessary for climate action, but too often they are also excluded from decision making or benefits and, instead, left to absorb the costs.”

The authors argue that the rush for critical minerals could undermine the very climate goals they are meant to serve.  While decarbonization is urgent, urgency cannot be an excuse for extraction that deepens inequality or damages the environment.

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Other authors include Raphael Deberdt of the Business School of Copenhagen, Nicole Smith and Aaron Malone of the Colorado School of Mines, Scott Odell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Washington University and Lydia Jennings of Dartmouth College.

The commentary published in the journal Nature Energy under the title, “A just energy transition requires just-shoring critical materials.” https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-025-01940-4

*Note: a long-form article expanding this framework is currently in review.

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Journal

Nature Energy

DOI

10.1038/s41560-025-01940-4 

Method of Research

Commentary/editorial

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A just energy transition requires just-shoring critical materials

 

Scientists confirm existence of molecule long believed to occur in oxidation

KTH, Royal Institute of Technology

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image: 

“This compound is the equivalent of the Higgs boson for oxidation chemistry,” says Barbara Noziere, pictured here with the spectrometer she used for first-ever observations of tetroxides. 

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Credit: David Callahan/KTH

Scientists in Sweden and the U.S. today reported the first-ever direct observation a type of short‑lived molecule that has shaped decades of thinking in atmospheric chemistry, combustion research and biomedical science.

Publishing in Science Advances, researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, and Kinetic Chemistry Research in Mountain View, California, say their discovery of long-theorized, oxygen-rich tetroxides has implications in a number of sciences, including atmospheric chemistry, biochemistry and medicine and combustion chemistry.

“This compound is the equivalent of the Higgs boson for oxidation chemistry,” says Barbara Nozière, professor of physical chemistry at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. “Its existence was assumed for decades but nobody had ever seen it.”

First theorized in the 1950s, tetroxides have been predicted to appear for a fleeting moment when two organic radicals react together, creating a molecule with four oxygen atoms in a row– a process called the Russell mechanism.

Although they disappear almost immediately, tetroxides play important roles in all the processes where organic compounds (or carbohydrates) are “burned” in contact with air, such as in fires, candlelight flames, car engines, but also at low temperature in Earth’s atmosphere and inside living organisms.

Evidence of their existence had to this point been indirect, contradictory or based on cold and extreme laboratory conditions. The team confirmed their presence using a unique mass‑spectrometric technique refined to detect highly unstable molecules without destroying them.

Surprisingly, they found that, in air, tetroxides are relatively stable, unlike in the conditions used in previous studies.

“The study confirms that tetroxides can exist at room temperature, in air, without needing extremely cold conditions used in earlier experiments,” Noziere says.

The revelation that they can be found outdoors and inside living organisms means they can follow unexpected reaction steps and result in unexpected oxidation products, that now need to be further studied.

That could possibly influence how long pollutants – such as paint solvents or smoke – last in the atmosphere, the creation of other airborne compounds, or even of aerosol particles.

Noziere says that measuring their lifespan — between 0.2 and 200 milliseconds — also helps scientists understand how fast certain reactions move and what other products they can lead to.

The findings also present significant implications for medical science, including research on oxidative stress and cancer therapies, where Russell mechanism is being used today in new therapeutic approaches, she says.

The research was funded with a grant from the European Research Council.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aeb6495 

Article Title

Observing elusive tetroxides in gas-phase radical reactions supports the Russell mechanism

Article Publication Date

13-Mar-2026

 

The ghosts we see

How afterimages reveal why the world appears stable

Technische Universität Berlin – Science of Intelligence

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image: 

Illustration of the induction (1) and appearance (2) of an afterimage, as well as its movement across eye movements (3) in egocentric visual space (top row). Note that despite the perception of movement the afterimage's position remains stationary on the retina (bottom row).

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Credit: ©Richard Schweitzer

Contrary to what you and I might experience when we explore the world, our eyes do not provide us with a continuous and stable view of it. They jump several times each second in rapid movements called saccades. Because the eye projects the world onto the retina, we should see the world shift abruptly each time the eyes move—the visual scene should feel unstable, yet the brain uses sophisticated mechanisms that ensure it does not.

A recent study, titled “High-fidelity but hypometric spatial localization of afterimages across saccades”, published in Science Advances, found that common afterimages, like the faint shape we all see after looking at a bright light, provide insights into how the brain achieves that stability. The work was conducted by Richard Schweitzer, Thomas Seel, Jörg Raisch, and Martin Rolfs, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence in Berlin. Using afterimages as an experimental tool, the team set out to measure how accurately the brain predicts the visual consequences of its own eye movements. The study reveals that these predictions are very accurate, but are subject to systematic errors.

Using afterimages to isolate the brain’s internal signals

The phenomenon that afterimages follow wherever we direct our gaze was already documented by Aristotle and reveals a striking dissociation: While the visual world appears stable when eye movements constantly shift the world across the retina, afterimages seem to drift across the scene despite remaining fixed on the retina. Visual stability and the apparent motion of afterimages may therefore be two sides of the same coin–the brain’s attempt to account for its own eye movements.

To examine these mechanisms, the experiments had to be conducted in complete darkness—the opposite to normal everyday vision where the richness of the visual scene provides constant feedback that helps the brain estimate each eye movement. Sitting in the dark, participants first fixated a bright flash that created an afterimage and then looked over to a second, briefly illuminated light source. Then, once the afterimage became clearly visible, brief probe lights appeared at specific positions, and participants reported whether the afterimage seemed to lie to the left of the probe light, to the right, or directly aligned with it.

From these responses the researchers could estimate where the afterimage was perceived. Eye-tracking measurements monitored where participants really looked—allowing the researchers to determine how closely perception tracked the actual movement of the eye.

What the study found: Prediction is highly accurate – but still slightly short

Afterimages closely followed the eyes: The larger the eye movement, the farther the afterimage appeared to move in space. Yet this match was not perfect. “On average, the perceived shift of the afterimage reached about 94 percent of the actual eye movement,” says Richard Schweitzer, lead author of the study. “In practical terms, perception follows eye movements very closely, but not perfectly.”

This small undershoot, called hypometria, held across individuals and remained consistent across different directions and sizes of eye movements. This suggests a systematic inaccuracy in the brain’s prediction rather than a random error. Even though the difference is subtle enough that most people never consciously notice it, understanding it requires looking at how the brain updates space after each eye movement.

The brain predicts before it sees

Now what actually determines where the afterimage appears? One possibility is that its perceived location is determined based on visual feedback that becomes available after each eye movement. The researchers tested this directly. In some trials, the saccade target (i.e., the light that participants were told to follow) remained briefly visible after the eye landed; in others it was shifted slightly to create deliberately misleading feedback.

Neither manipulation changed where participants perceived the afterimage. Indeed, there is good evidence that the brain uses an internal copy of the command sent to the eye muscles, called an efference copy, to predict how the visual scene should shift. That signal effectively tells the brain: “the eyes just moved this far”, allowing perception to anticipate the consequences of the movement instead of waiting for new visual input to correct perception afterward. Movements of afterimages now reveal that visual predictions derived from the efference copy fall short of the eye movement’s true consequences.

When eye movements change, perception changes with them

That raises a natural follow-up question: If perception depends on the brain’s efference copy, what happens when those movements themselves change? Eye movements are not fixed. When the eyes consistently miss their targets—say, due to fatigue of the eye muscles—people gradually adjust how far their eyes move. This process, known as saccadic adaptation, can be introduced in the lab by shifting the target of an eye movement with each saccade. This trick provided another insight into the brain’s prediction of the visual consequences of eye movements: As participants’ saccades became shorter through adaptation, the perceived shift of the afterimage shortened with them. Yet, the small systematic undershoot remained, whether saccades were adapted or not.

Why a small error may actually be expected

That remaining mismatch may not be a flaw. Natural eye movements often fall slightly short of their targets, so it makes sense that the brain’s internal estimate reflects this tendency. Assuming a stable visual environment–where objects do not suddenly change their positions during saccades–observers can use visual cues in everyday life to learn how much the visual scene typically changes after a given eye movement. If saccades tend to fall slightly short, it would only be reasonable to expect a slightly smaller visual shift as well. What may matter more than perfect accuracy of the movement is that perception stays reliably aligned with it.

What afterimages reveal about visual stability

If afterimages remain fixed on the retina, then why do they appear to move with our gaze? One possible explanation is that the brain uses its knowledge about the consequences of an upcoming eye movement to predict where an object should appear on the retina after the saccade –a process known as predictive remapping. If this prediction is accurate and matches the object’s actual position, as confirmed by visual feedback, the object is perceived as stable.

In normal visual environments this works well. But an afterimage inevitably violates this prediction: because it stays fixed on the retina while the eyes move, the brain can only conclude that it moved in the same direction. In this case, the size of the prediction error corresponds to the size of predicted visual change.

“Afterimages become a useful tool for studying how the brain keeps the visual world stable by predicting the sensory consequences of its own movements,” says Schweitzer. Understanding these predictive mechanisms may provide insights beyond basic vision science, for example in robotics, virtual reality, and clinical studies of eye-movement disorders, where linking movement with sensory consequences reliably is essential.

At a glance

•    Human eyes move several times per second in rapid jumps called saccades, yet the visual world appears stable.
•    Afterimages allow researchers to isolate the brain’s internal signals that track these eye movements.
•    The brain predicts the visual consequences of eye movements with striking accuracy.
•    However, perceived afterimage movement slightly undershoots the true eye movement, reaching about 94% of the actual shift.
•    This consistent undershoot suggests a small but expectable bias in the brain’s internal estimate of eye movement-induced change.
•    The findings help explain how the brain keeps the visual world stable despite constant motion of the eyes.

 

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aeb0557 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

High-fidelity but hypometric spatial localization of afterimages across saccades

Article Publication Date

13-Mar-2026

 

Targeting two flu proteins sharply reduces airborne spread

A study in ferrets — which have remarkably similar respiratory systems to humans — suggests that immunity to two proteins in the H1N1 influenza virus sharply reduces transmission

Penn State

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A long-running debate in vaccine design revolves around whether a vaccine should be optimized to prevent the virus from replicating inside an infected host or prevent the virus from transmitting to others. New research led by Penn State scientists suggests there may not have to be a tradeoff.

The study in animal models, published today (March 13) in the journal Science Advances, demonstrates a way to stop the influenza virus from leaping from one host to the next while continuing to keep the virus from replicating inside the host. The findings reveal that the body’s defenses against two proteins on the surface of the virus — hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) — can work to reduce the chance of airborne spread in a measurable way.

“This suggests that intentionally targeting these two proteins together in future vaccines could help curb spread,” said Troy Sutton, who led the study and serves as Huck Early Career Chair in Virology and associate professor of immunology and infectious disease at Penn State. “Critically, transmission was reduced without accelerating viral evolution inside the host, which is a key concern in vaccine design.”

The researchers used ferrets as models to test how different types of immunity (from either vaccination or prior infection) against an influenza H1N1 virus, a strain that causes annual outbreaks in the fall or winter months, affected both viral replication and the likelihood of airborne transmission.

“The virus used in our study is considered representative of seasonal influenza viruses, or viruses that cause outbreaks every fall and winter,” Sutton said.

Infection with an H1N1 influenza virus causes symptoms like fever, cough and fatigue and can lead to severe respiratory illness or even death, particularly in high-risk groups like children, the elderly, and those with weakened immunity. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that seasonal influenza viruses, such as the H1N1 virus studied by Sutton’s team, infect up to 1 billion people worldwide each year.  As a result, 3 to 5 million people develop severe disease and as many as 650,000 people die from influenza infections each year.  

Ferrets, which have remarkably similar respiratory systems to humans, closely mimic how humans become infected with and transmit influenza viruses like H1N1. By pairing infected “donor” ferrets with uninfected “contact” ferrets in shared‑air cages, the team could directly measure how immunity to hemagglutinin, neuraminidase or both influenced viral transmission. The controlled environment allowed the researchers to track viral shedding, transmission rates and viral evolution to develop an understanding of how specific immune responses shaped influenza transmission.

Across every scenario, animals with immunity to both proteins were consistently less likely to pass the virus on to nearby, uninfected ferrets. Transmission dropped by half, an effect Sutton described not as synergistic but additive, meaning immune responses to both of the HA and NA proteins equally contributed to the overall reduction in transmission.

The team also identified a measurable threshold for effectiveness. When viral levels dipped below a certain point early in infection, the likelihood of spreading the virus fell below 50%.

“That insight could help guide future vaccine design, especially efforts that aim not only to prevent severe illness but to limit viral transmission itself,” Sutton said.

Critically, he added, the team found no evidence that the virus evolved to evade the body’s immunity to the two proteins. Across dozens of animal models, no consistent escape variants — virus mutations that evolve to evade immune protection — emerged, suggesting that targeting both HA and NA does not appear to drive rapid viral adaptation.

“Our work strengthens the growing consensus among experts that influenza vaccines need to target multiple influenza virus proteins to be maximally effective,” Sutton said. “Vaccines of the future may need to do more than trigger strong antibody responses. They may need to blunt spread at the source and that may mean doubling up on the immune targets the virus relies on most.”

Other Penn State co-authors on the paper are Kayla M. Septer, Devanshi R. Patel, Cassandra J. Field, Derek G. Sim and Cara Exten. Other authors on the paper are Wei Wang, Allison E. Roder, Matthew Chung, Katherine H. Restori and Elodie Ghedin of the Systems Genomics Section, Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Elizabeth B. Norton of Tulane University.

The NIAID Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance, USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health funded this work.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aea8719 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Immunity to hemagglutinin and neuraminidase results in additive reductions in airborne transmission of influenza H1N1 virus in ferrets

Article Publication Date

13-Mar-2026