China Has Paid a High Price for Its Dominance in Rare Earths
But for decades in northern China, toxic sludge from rare earth processing has been dumped into a four-square-mile artificial lake. In south-central China, rare earth mines have poisoned dozens of once-green valleys and left hillsides stripped to barren red clay.
Achieving dominance in rare earths came with a heavy cost for China, which largely tolerated severe environmental damage for many years. The industrialized world, by contrast, had tighter regulations and stopped accepting even limited environmental harm from the industry as far back as the 1990s, when rare earth mines and processing centers closed elsewhere.
In China, the worst damage occurred in and around Baotou, a flat, industrial city of two million people in China's Inner Mongolia, on the southern edge of the Gobi Desert. Baotou calls itself the world capital of the rare earth industry, but the city and its people bear the scars from decades of poorly regulated rare earths production.
An artificial lake of sludge known as the Weikuang Dam, four square miles in size, holds the waste left over after metals are extracted from mined ore. During the winter and spring, the sludge dries out. The dust that then blows off the lake is contaminated with lead, cadmium and other heavy metals, including traces of radioactive thorium, according to technical papers by Chinese scholars.
During the summer rainy season, the sludge becomes coated with a layer of water that mixes with poisons and thorium. This dangerous mix seeps into the groundwater underneath the lake.
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Washington Post
2 hours ago
- Washington Post
How high-tech tools, and pigs, could help in the search for Mexican drug cartel victims
ZAPOPAN, Mexico — First the scientists dress dead swine in clothes, then they dispose of the carcasses. Some they wrap in packing tape, others they chop up. They stuff the animals into plastic bags or wrap them in blankets. They cover them in lime or burn them. Some are buried alone, others in groups. Then they watch. The pigs are playing an unlikely role as proxies for humans in research to help find the staggering number of people who have gone missing in Mexico during decades of drug cartel violence. Families of the missing are usually left to look for their loved ones with little support from authorities. But now, government scientists are testing the newest satellite, geophysical and biological mapping techniques — along with the pigs — to offer clues that they hope could lead to the discovery of at least some of the bodies. The ranks of Mexico's missing exploded in the years following the launch of then-President Felipe Calderón's war against drug cartels in 2006. A strategy that targeted the leaders of a handful of powerful cartels led to a splintering of organized crime and the multiplication of violence to control territory. With near complete impunity, owing to the complicity or inaction of the authorities, cartels found that making anyone they think is in their way disappear was better than leaving bodies in the street. Mexican administrations have sometimes been unwilling to recognize the problem and at other times are staggered by the scale of violence their justice system is unprepared to address. Mexico's disappeared could populate a small city. Official data in 2013 tallied 26,000 missing, but the count now surpasses 130,000 — more than any other Latin American nation. The United Nations has said there are indications that the disappearances are 'generalized or systematic.' If the missing people are found — dead or alive — it is usually by their loved ones. Guided by information from witnesses, parents and siblings search for graves by walking through cartel territory, plunging a metal rod into the earth and sniffing for the scent of death. Around 6,000 clandestine graves have been found since 2007, and new discoveries are made all the time. Tens of thousands of remains have yet to be identified. Jalisco, which is home to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, has the largest number of people reported missing in Mexico: 15,500. In March, human bone fragments and hundreds of items of clothing were discovered at a cartel ranch in the state. Authorities denied it was the site of a mass grave . José Luis Silván, a coordinator of the mapping project and scientist at CentroGeo, a federal research institute focused on geospacial information, said Jalisco's disappeared are 'why we're here.' The mapping project, launched in 2023, is a collaboration by Guadalajara University, Mexico's National Autonomous University and the University of Oxford in England, alongside the Jalisco Search Commission, a state agency that organizes local searches with relatives. 'No other country is pushing so strongly, so creatively' to test and combine new techniques, said Derek Congram, a Canadian forensic anthropologist, whose expertise in geographic information systems inspired the Mexican project. Still, Congram warns, technology 'is not a panacea.' 'Ninety percent of searches are resolved with a good witness and digging,' he said. Silván walks by a site where scientists buried 14 pigs about two years ago. He says they may not know how well the technology works, where and when it can be used, or under what conditions, for at least three years. 'Flowers came up because of the phosphorous at the surface, we didn't see that last year,' he said as he took measurements at one of the gravesites. 'The mothers who search say that that little yellow flower always blooms over the tombs and they use them as a guide.' Pigs and humans are closely related, famously sharing about 98% of DNA. But for the mapping project, the physical similarities also matter. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, pigs resemble humans in size, fat distribution and the structure and thickness of skin. A big Colombian drone mounted with a hyperspectral camera flies over the pig burial site. Generally used by mining companies, the camera measures light reflected by substances in the soil, including nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and shows how they vary as the pigs decompose. The colorful image it produces offers clues of what to look for in the hunt for graves. 'This isn't pure science,' Silván said. 'It is science and action. Everything learned has to be applied immediately, rather than wait for it to mature, because there's urgency.' Researchers also employ thermal drones, laser scanners and other gadgets to register anomalies, underground movements and electrical currents. One set of graves is encased behind a pane of transparent acrylic, providing a window for scientists to observe the pigs' decomposition in real time. The Jalisco commission compares and analyzes flies, beetles, plants and soil recovered from the human and pig graves. Each grave is a living 'micro ecosystem,' said Tunuari Chávez, the commission's director of context analysis. Triggered by the disappearance of 43 students in 2014 , Silván and his colleagues started gathering information about ground-penetrating radar, electric resistivity and satellite imagery from around the world. They studied University of Tennessee research on human corpses buried at a 'body farm.' They looked at grave-mapping techniques used in the Balkans, Colombia and Ukraine. 'What good is science or technology if it doesn't solve problems?' he said. They learned new applications of satellite analysis, then began their first experiments burying pigs and studying the substances criminals use to dispose of bodies. They found lime is easily detected, but hydrocarbons, hydrochloric acid and burned flesh are not. Chávez's team worked to combine the science with what they knew about how the cartels operate. For example, they determined that disappearances in Jalisco commonly happened along cartel routes between Pacific ports, drug manufacturing facilities and the U.S. border, and that most of the missing are found in the same municipality where they disappeared. The experience of the families of the missing also informs the research. Some observed that graves are often found under trees whose roots grow vertically, so those digging the graves can remain in the shade. Mothers of missing loved ones invited by researchers to visit one of the pig burial sites were able to identify most of the unmarked graves by sight alone, because of the plants and soil placement, Silván said. 'The knowledge flows in both directions,' he said. Maribel Cedeño, who has been looking for her missing brother for four years, said she believes the drones and other technology will be helpful. 'I never imagined being in this situation, finding bodies, becoming such an expert,' she said of her quest. Héctor Flores has been searching for his son since 2021. He questions why so much time and effort has been invested in methods that have not led to concrete discoveries, when the families have proven track records with little official support. Although the research has not yet concluded, the Jalisco Search Commission is already using a thermal drone, a laser scanner and a multispectral camera to help families look for their missing relatives in some cases. But it is unclear whether authorities across Mexico will ever be willing to use, or able to afford, the high-tech aides. Congram, the forensic scientist, said researchers are aware of the limitations of technology, but that 'you always have to try, fail, fail again and keep trying.'
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Yahoo
Scientists Find Secret Code in Human DNA
One person's junk is another's treasure. An international team of scientists have found that strings of "junk" DNA in the human genome that were previously written off as having no useful function are actually pretty important after all. The work, published as a study in the journal Science Advances, focuses on transposable elements, a class of DNA sequences that can "jump," via a biological copy-and-paste mechanism, to different locations in a genome. These "jumping genes" take up nearly 50 percent of human DNA; in other organisms, the proportion is even higher. What the researchers from Japan, China, Canada, and the US found is that a particular family of these TEs, called MER11, can strongly influence gene expression and act like "genetic switches" — without actually changing the underlying DNA. "Our genome was sequenced long ago, but the function of many of its parts remain unknown," study coauthor Fumitaka Inoue from Kyoto University said in a statement about the work. MER11 sequences are what's known as long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons. Spookily, these are believed to have originated from an endogenous retrovirus (ERV) that infected a simian ancestor tens of millions of years ago, hijacking the DNA of the cells it invaded to produce copies of its genetic makeup that have never gone away, but have largely remained inert. Per the researchers, at least eight percent of the human genome comes from these retroviruses. That, plus all the other TEs littering our genome, makes for a lot of puzzling clutter for human scientists to sift through. The authors argue that the current methods for classifying and annotating TEs are inaccurate, leading to DNA sequences being overlooked as genetic junk. This inspired them to test their own classification system. "The proper classification and annotation of LTR instances is critical to understanding their evolution, co-option and potential impact on the host," the authors wrote in the study. The researchers' system classified MER11 sequences based on their evolutionary relationships and how well they were preserved in primate genomes, according to the researchers' statement. Then, they divided MER11 into four separate subfamilies, MER11_G1 through G4, based on their age. This allowed the team to compare the MER11 subfamilies to what are known as epigenetic marks: chemicals that can affect how important proteins function, and as a consequence affect gene activity. Crucially, epigenetic marks don't have to physically alter a cell's DNA to modify a cell's behavior, such as silencing a gene that should be expressed. Accurately tying the MER11 subfamilies to the markers is a key step to revealing the extent of their impact on gene expression. With that as a springboard, the team tested some 7,000 MER11 sequences from humans and primates, measured how much each one affected gene activity, and found that the youngest MER11 subfamily, G4, had a strong ability to influence gene expression — namely, by bearing its own DNA "motifs" that attract proteins called transcription factors that regulate what genes are switched on and off. "Young MER11_G4 binds to a distinct set of transcription factors, indicating that this group gained different regulatory functions through sequence changes and contributes to speciation," lead author Xun Chen from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in the statement. The implications are fascinating. Though these strands of DNA may have started as "junk," they have gradually insinuated their way to playing a role in gene regulation today — suggesting a vast portion of unknown evolutionary history that we're only scratching the surface of. "Transposable elements are thought to play important roles in genome evolution, and their significance is expected to become clearer as research continues to advance," Inoue said. More on genetics: Elon Musk Using Eugenics Startup to Inspect DNA of Potential Babies for Intelligence
The Verge
17 hours ago
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