In Canada Lake, Robot Learns To Mine Without Disrupting Marine Life
Ottawa:
Three robotic arms extended under the water in a Canadian lake, delicately selecting pebbles from the bed, before storing them back inside the machine.
The exercise was part of a series of tests the robot was undergoing before planned deployment in the ocean, where its operators hope the machine can transform the search for the world's most sought-after metals.
The robot was made by Impossible Metals, a company founded in California in 2020, which says it is trying to develop technology that allows the seabed to be harvested with limited ecological disruption.
Conventional underwater harvesting involves scooping up huge amounts of material in search of potato-sized things called poly-metallic nodules.
These nodules contain nickel, copper, cobalt, or other metals needed for electric vehicle batteries, among other key products.
Impossible Metals' co-founder Jason Gillham told AFP his company's robot looks for the nodules "in a selective way."
The prototype, being tested in the province of Ontario, remains stationary in the water, hovering over the lake bottom.
In a lab, company staff monitor the yellow robot on screens, using what looks like a video game console to direct its movements.
Using lights, cameras and artificial intelligence, the robot tries to identify the sought-after nodules while leaving aquatic life -- such as octopuses' eggs, coral, or sponges -- undisturbed.
'A bit like bulldozers'
In a first for the nascent sector, Impossible Metals has requested a permit from US President Donald Trump to use its robot in American waters around Samoa, in the Pacific.
The company is hoping that its promise of limited ecological disruption will give it added appeal.
Competitors, like The Metals Company, use giant machines that roll along the seabed and suck up the nodules, a highly controversial technique.
Douglas McCauley, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told AFP this method scoops up ocean floor using collectors or excavators, "a bit like bulldozers," he explained.
Everything is then brought up to ships, where the nodules are separated from waste, which is tossed back into the ocean.
This creates large plumes of sediment and toxins with a multitude of potential impacts, he said.
A less invasive approach, like that advocated by Impossible Metals, would reduce the risk of environmental damage, McCauley explained.
But he noted lighter-touch harvesting is not without risk.
The nodules themselves also harbor living organisms, and removing them even with a selective technique, involves destroying the habitat, he said.
Impossible Metals admits its technology cannot detect microscopic life, but the company claims to have a policy of leaving 60 percent of the nodules untouched.
McCauley is unconvinced, explaining "ecosystems in the deep ocean are especially fragile and sensitive."
"Life down there moves very slowly, so they reproduce very slowly, they grow very slowly."
Duncan Currie of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition said it was impossible to assess the impact of any deep sea harvesting.
"We don't know enough yet either in terms of the biodiversity and the ecosystem down there," he told AFP.
According to the international scientific initiative Ocean Census, only 250,000 species are known, out of the two million that are estimated to populate the oceans.
High demand
Mining is "always going to have some impact," said Impossible Metals chief executive and co-founder Oliver Gunasekara, who has spent most of his career in the semiconductor field.
But, he added, "we need a lot more critical minerals, as we want to electrify everything."
Illustrating the global rush toward underwater mining, Impossible Metals has raised US$15 million from investors to build and test a first series of its Eureka 3 robot in 2026.
The commercial version will be the size of a shipping container and will expand from three to 16 arms, and its battery will grow from 14 to nearly 200 kilowatt-hours.
The robot will be fully autonomous and self-propel, without cables or tethers to the surface, and be equipped with sensors.
While awaiting the US green light, the company hopes to finalize its technology within two to three years, conduct ocean tests, build a fleet, and operate through partnerships elsewhere in the world.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hindu
an hour ago
- The Hindu
When you want to move, does your brain know before you've decided?
It is the end of a long, hard work day and all you feel like doing is flop on the sofa and watch TV. Your eyes move to something on the screen and watch it for a few minutes, then you think to yourself: 'I wonder what's on elsewhere…'. So you reach for the TV remote and switch the channel. At this precise moment, let's freeze frame and ask: how did this simple decision unfold? Which happened first: the conscious recognition of the intention to move your arm or the brain activity required for the movement? For a long time, people grappled with this as a 'chicken or egg' question and arrived at only philosophical answers, not scientific ones. Indeed, for many years the question was actually believed to be outside the purview of science. The international chain In the early 1980s, American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet published his pioneering work exploring what scientists now call the intentional chain. In its entirety, the intentional chain entails an intent (the desire to change the channel in the example above), an action (reaching for the remote), and an effect (e.g. sounds/sights from a different channel). Due to the technical challenges involved, it wasn't possible for scientists to study the intentional chain from beginning to end — until now. In a study published recently in PLoS Biology, Jean-Paul Noel from the University of Minnesota in the US and collaborators from the US, the UK, and Switzerland, reported an experiment in which they selectively targeted each element of the intentional chain, one by one. They found that conscious recognition of the intent to move coincides with activation in the M1 cortical area, the part of the brain controlling voluntary limb movements. One surprise was a difference in the timing of conscious recognition: the perception of movement and the brain activity corresponding to this intent. First study of its kind The study's participant was a tetraplegic person outfitted with a brain implant in his M1 area (a.k.a. the primary motor cortex). Electrical impulses from the implant stimulated the area. This setup, called a brain-machine interface, used with a device called neuromuscular electrical stimulator (NMES), which activated forearm muscles to cause hand movements, made it possible for the researchers to activate or inactivate individual components of the intentional chain in the study. A particular hand movement was of interest in this setup. The participant held a ball in his hand. When he squeezed it, a sound was emitted exactly 300 mslater. This was the environmental effect, the last piece of the intentional chain. During the experiment, the participant was asked to watch a clock on a computer screen. Depending on the specific trial, he had to report the reading on the clock — at the time he felt the urge to move his hand, the time he moved his hand or the time he heard an audio tone. This was the first study to look in the M1 area in the context of subjective intention of voluntary actions. The researchers found that the timeline of activity in this area was somewhat different than that reported for other brain areas in previous research. Specifically, all the other areas had been activated prior to intention and action — whereas M1 showed activity before but also during a voluntary action. This makes sense given that M1 is the final stop in the brain, before the signal moves to the spinal cord and finally to muscles of the hand. Rearing up Normally, when you intend to move your right hand to pick up an object or lift your foot up to kick a ball, the desire for voluntary movement is reflected as electrical activity in specific parts of the brain. Even before Libet conducted his foundational work, German scientist Hans Helmut Kornhuber placed electrodes along the heads of participants in a study who each made a voluntary decision — to press a button any time they felt like it. He conducted this study in the 1960s. Kornhuber found that in the moments leading up to an individual pressing the button, the electrodes recorded a gradual increase in the strength of an electric signal, which he called the readiness potential. Think of it as the brain gearing up to act. This meant that if these same brain parts were stimulated with electric signals, one could manufacture in the individual an urge to move the hand or the foot. Kornhuber's work, later confirmed by others, proved there was electrical activity in the brain before the individual performed a voluntary action. Subsequent research showed that certain brain circuits are activated before an individual is even aware of their intention to perform a voluntary movement. In the new study, Noel & co. explored the question: when do we become aware of a decision we are about to make? Interesting patterns In the first round with their setup, the researchers studied the full intentional chain. They recorded electrical activity in the participant's M1 area caused by the intent to move his hand using functional MRI. They recorded any subsequent movement of that hand with NMES. Finally, they recorded the sound of the participant squeezing the ball in his hand. Thus, they had an objective way to measure each step of the intentional chain — a significant departure from previous studies in which researchers depended on participants' responses themselves. When the researchers compared the objective measurements to the participant's subjective perceptions, some interesting patterns emerged. For example, when the team asked the participant to report the time at which he developed a conscious awareness of his intention, his answer suggested his perception preceded actual electrical activity recorded by the MRI. Similarly, when asked to report the time at which he perceived his hand began to move, the researcher found his perception preceded the signal recorded by NMES. In the next round, the researchers used NMES to move the participant's hand, thus bypassing the subjective intent and therefore electrical activity in the brain. This time, the participant perceived that his hand moved at a time well after the measured electric signal. When the researchers blocked the hand movement signal from NMES, while keeping the intent and effect parts of the chain intact, the participant perceived his intention to occur much earlier — more so than the full intentional chain. In either case the difference was only in the order of milliseconds, but for the brain this is an eternity. The role of M1 The work of Patrick Haggard at University College London may help understand these results better. Haggard & co. asked participants in a study to report the timing of an action (pressing a keyboard button, say) and the timing of an effect of their action (a colour changing on the computer monitor). The team's results showed that participants perceived a shorter time interval between a voluntary action and its effect — called the intentional binding — than what was objectively recorded. In this context, Noel's team have discovered a new form of intentional binding: between intention and action. Since the work of Kornhuber and Libet, as more scientists examined the time between an individual perceiving a voluntary decision and that decision turning into action, it has been becoming clearer that the timing of brain activity in relation to a voluntary decision depends on where in the brain one looks. Through multiple attempts to understand the brain's goings-on in the moments leading up to a voluntary action, scientists have mapped the parts that light up with electrical activity as an individual consciously develops an urge to take some voluntary action as well as areas that light up with the conscious perception of having taken the action. In the new study, Noel et al. have added to this knowledge by revealing the role the M1 area plays with the start of a conscious decision to take some action and during the execution. Where are you looking? In the last few decades, cognitive neuroscientists have found that a single voluntary decision for an individual involves multiple different slices in their brain. There's the slice of 'what' decision to make, 'when' to make it, 'whether or not' to translate that decision to action. Activities in various parts of the brain correspond to different slices and the timing of brain activity in relation to a voluntary decision depends on which slice is examined. So if we look in the premotor or parietal cortical areas, we find them activated before a voluntary movement has occurred. The new study shows that the M1 area integrates signals from premotor-parietal areas, which explains its activity in the moments leading up to the voluntary action. The specific way the tests were set up made it possible for the researchers to separate M1 activity due to intention from its activity due to action. In a situation where a decision is converted to action, that of reaching for the remote in the example earlier, M1 activity relays that decision down to the spinal cord and to muscles of the arm. The fact that the study was conducted with a single tetraplegic participant raises obvious questions about whether its findings can be generalised. In another recent study in Nature Communications, Noel collaborated with Italian scientist Tommaso Bertoni to examine the same question in 30 healthy participants. They aimed to study the participants' brain activity using electrodes placed on their scalps (in contrast to electrodes implanted inside the M1 area of the brain). The results have supported the role of the M1 area of the brain in translating voluntary decisions to actions, adding further credence to the findings by Noel and team in their paper. Dr. Reeteka Sud is a neuroscientist by training and senior scientist at the Center for Brain and Mind, Department of Psychiatry, NIMHANS, Bengaluru.
India Today
2 hours ago
- India Today
KILL the BILL: Elon Musk ramps up attack on Trump tax and spending bill
Elon Musk unleashed a relentless stream of posts on Wednesday, slamming President Donald Trump's "big beautiful bill." He urged his followers to lobby their lawmakers and "Kill the Bill." He also warned that it could hasten the nation's slide toward financial ruin."Call your Senator, Call your Congressman," Musk wrote on his social platform X. "Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL." The post was one of several sharp criticisms levelled at the legislation, which Musk claims balloons the deficit and betrays fiscal sanity. advertisementThe Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who recently left his role as head of the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, has turned his influence -- and 200 million-plus followers -- toward lobbying Congress to reject what he calls reckless federal spending. "Mammoth spending bills are bankrupting America! ENOUGH," Musk wrote, continuing his attack on what he says is unchecked fiscal excess."A new spending bill should be drafted that doesn't massively grow the deficit and increase the debt ceiling by 5 TRILLION DOLLARS," the TeslaCEO said in another post. "A new spending bill should be drafted that doesn't massively grow the deficit," Musk, the largest Republican donor in the 2024 election cycle, said on another post. "America is in the fast lane to debt slavery."advertisementTop congressional Republicans rejected his criticism and one White House official on Wednesday called the Tesla CEO's moves "infuriating."Some Senate Republicans downplayed Musk's influence."I don't think very many senators are that interested in what Elon has to say. It's amusing. But we're serious policymakers. We have to govern, and so we have to deal with reality," Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told Tuesday, Musk blasted Trump's "big, beautiful bill" of tax breaks and spending cuts as a "disgusting abomination.""I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore," Musk posted on X. "This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it." The legislation, which has passed the House and is currently under debate in the Senate, would curtail subsidies that benefit Tesla, Musk's electric tech billionaire followed his criticism with a threat aimed at Republicans."In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people," he wrote in another X DEFENCE CUTS COULD HIT MUSK HARDMusk's business interests stand to take a hit if lawmakers approve Trump's bill, which would slash funding for electric vehicles and related technologies. Musk is the chief executive of Tesla, the nation's largest electric vehicle manufacturer, and SpaceX, which has massive defence month, Musk said he was "disappointed" by the spending bill, a much milder criticism than the broadside he levelled on Wednesday afternoon, Trump's account on his own social media site, Truth Social, reposted a screenshot of Musk thanking the president for letting him lead Speaker Mike Johnson, in response, said Musk was "flat wrong" about the bill's impact on the deficit and revealed he tried calling Musk on Tuesday night to no avail. Musk replied with a video clip of Johnson's comments and doubled down: "We need a new bill that doesn't grow the deficit."His final jab may have hit hardest: "No one who actually reads the bill should be able to stomach it."Musk's opposition to the bill comes just days after Trump publicly praised him during a ceremonial Oval Office farewell — a moment now overshadowed by Musk's dramatic public rejection of the president's fiscal inputs from AP, ReutersTune InTrending Reel
Indian Express
3 hours ago
- Indian Express
Defence equipment, oil, cars: Where India could lower tariffs to reach deal with US
With US trade negotiators set to reach India Thursday for a two-day visit, the India-US trade deal negotiations are entering their final stage and could soon see Delhi opening its market and lowering tariffs on a range of American products – from select agricultural goods to defence equipment. This is in exchange for concessions on reciprocal tariffs and improved access to the US market for India's labour-intensive sectors such as textile and leather products. The White House said Tuesday that the US had asked countries to make their best offers on trade negotiations by Wednesday, as the July 8 deadline for reciprocal tariffs is just five weeks away. 'I can confirm the merits and the content of the letter. The United States Trade Representative (USTR) sent this letter to all of our trading partners just to give them a friendly reminder that the deadline is coming up,' White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. Improving market access for US exports such as oil, armaments, soybeans, corn, whisky and automobiles could help address Washington's concerns over its goods trade deficit with India and high tariff barriers. US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said Tuesday that the US aimed to bring back advanced manufacturing and bridge the trade deficit by increasing exports to India, adding that both sides had 'found a place that really works' for them. Indian officials have indicated that diversifying oil and defence procurement is in the country's strategic interest and sourcing more from the US could also significantly help bridge the goods trade gap, as India's refining capacity has been increasing alongside oil import dependency, which surged to 90 per cent in April 2025. India's oil import mix has already undergone a significant shift since the Ukraine war, with Russia emerging as the top supplier, replacing Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Official trade data showed that India had already stepped up oil purchases from the US. India's import of crude oil from the US jumped 11.49 per cent to $63 billion in March 2025 compared to the previous year. India has had long standing defence ties with Russia, owing to its reliability during times when Western countries imposed sanctions. However, the US now appears to be leveraging its position as the world's largest market to boost defence equipment exports to India and reduce Delhi's dependence on Russia. Speaking at the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) in Washington DC, Lutnick said: 'There were certain things that the Indian government did that generally rubbed the United States the wrong way. For instance, they generally buy military gear from Russia. That's a way to kind of get under the skin of America, if you go to buy your armaments from Russia.' He said India is already 'addressing' this issue. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the largest share of India's arms imports between 2020 and 2024 still came from Russia at about 36 per cent. However, this was significantly lower than the 55 per cent recorded in 2015-19 and 72 per cent in 2010-14. SIPRI's report released in March suggested that India has increased domestic manufacturing and is shifting its arms supply relations towards Western suppliers – most notably France, Israel and the US – at a time when Russia is prioritising domestic production amid the ongoing Ukraine war. US arms exports grew by 21 per cent between 2015-19 and 2020-24. The US share of global arms exports rose from 35 per cent to 43 per cent – nearly equal to the combined total of the next eight largest exporters, according to SIPRI. From high tariffs on agricultural imports to restrictions on genetically modified (GM) seeds and products, the US has criticised several Indian trade policies that have limited US exports. Under the new trade agreements, the US is seeking increased market access for its agricultural products, especially soya and corn – two of its top export items to China. Amid the likelihood of a protracted trade tussle with China, the US deal with India is likely to ensure greater market access for these two products. Additionally, the US may also secure improved access for its apples. A NITI Aayog working paper in May stated that India could offer some concessions on 'soybean oil imports' to reduce the trade imbalance, without harming domestic production. India is the largest importer of edible oil globally, and the US has a surplus of soybean exports. 'We should also explore the option of importing soybean seed and using it for extracting oil in coastal areas, then selling the oil in the domestic market and exporting the meal, for which there is adequate overseas demand. This will avoid genetically modified (GM) feed entering the Indian market,' the paper, authored by Senior Adviser at NITI Aayog Raka Saxena and Member Ramesh Chand, said. 'Similarly, corn may be imported for ethanol blending, and its by-products – like Distiller's Dried Grains with Solubles (DDGS) – can be entirely exported to avoid GM feed in the country. US corn is cheaper and can be used to meet India's biofuel targets without disrupting local food and feed markets,' it said. Notably, soybeans and corn are among the top exports of US to China and according to a Reuters report, US soybean exports could drop 20 per cent and prices may plunge if the US-China trade dispute remains unresolved. If the trade agreement with the UK is any indication, India is likely to open its highly protected automobile and alcoholic beverage sectors to the US, its largest trade partner. Even before negotiations with the US began, India slashed duties on bourbon whisky to 50 per cent from the earlier 150 per cent. Bourbon whisky is primarily produced in the US, with about 95 per cent made in Kentucky. Under the UK deal, India cut tariffs on automotive imports from over 100 per cent to 10 per cent – although the reduction is phased over 10 to 15 years. A similar, if not more favourable, deal could be offered to the US. President Donald Trump had previously stated that high tariffs in India made it difficult for companies like Harley-Davidson to operate in the country.
