Mountain Pass (shown), in southeastern California, remains the United States’ only mine for rare earth elements, the building blocks of magnets used in smartphones, wind turbines and electric vehicles.
In spring 1949, three prospectors armed with Geiger counters set out to hunt for treasure in the arid mountains of southern Nevada and southeastern California.
In the previous century, those mountains yielded gold, silver, copper and cobalt. But the men were looking for a different kind of treasure: uranium. The world was emerging from World War II and careening into the Cold War. The United States needed uranium to build its nuclear weapons arsenal. Mining homegrown sources became a matter of national security.
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After weeks of searching, the trio hit what they thought was pay dirt. Their instruments detected intense radioactivity in brownish-red veins of ore exposed in a rocky outcrop within California’s Clark Mountain Range. But instead of uranium, the brownish-red stuff turned out to be bastnaesite, a mineral bearing fluorine, carbon and 17 curious elements known collectively as rare earths. Traces of radioactive thorium, also in the ore, had set the Geiger counters pinging.
As disappointing as that must have been, the bastnaesite still held value, and the prospectors sold their claim to the Molybdenum Corporation of America, later called Molycorp. The company was interested in mining the rare earths. During the mid-20th century, rare earth elements were becoming useful in a variety of ways: Cerium , for example, was the basis for a glass-polishing powder and europium lent luminescence to recently invented color television screens and fluorescent lamps.
For the next few decades, the site, later dubbed Mountain Pass mine, was the world’s top source for rare earth elements, until two pressures became too much. By the late 1980s, China was intensively mining its own rare earths — and selling them at lower prices. And a series of toxic waste spills at Mountain Pass brought production at the struggling mine to a halt in 2002.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. The green-tech revolution of the 21st century brought new attention to Mountain Pass, which later reopened and remains the only U.S. mine for rare earths.
Rare earths are now integral to the manufacture of many carbon-neutral technologies — plus a whole host of tools that move the modern world. These elements are the building blocks of small, superefficient permanent magnets that keep smartphones buzzing, wind turbines spinning, electric vehicles zooming and more.
Here are the steps that get rare earth elements out of the ground and into our hi-tech products. While the United States mines and concentrates rare earths, later steps needed to make magnets currently happen overseas.
Rare earths are not actually rare on Earth, but they tend to be scattered throughout the crust at low concentrations. And the ore alone is worth relatively little without the complex, often environmentally hazardous processing involved in converting the ore into a usable form, says Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Delaware in Newark. As a result, the rare earth mining industry is wrestling with a legacy of environmental problems.
Rare earths are mined by digging vast open pits in the ground, which can contaminate the environment and disrupt ecosystems. When poorly regulated, mining can produce wastewater ponds filled with acids, heavy metals and radioactive material that might leak into groundwater. Processing the raw ore into a form useful to make magnets and other tech is a lengthy effort that takes large amounts of water and potentially toxic chemicals, and produces voluminous waste.
“We need rare earth elements … to help us with the transition to a climate-safe future,” says Michele Bustamante, a sustainability researcher at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. Yet “everything that we do when we’re mining is impactful environmentally,” Bustamante says.
But there are ways to reduce mining’s footprint, says Thomas Lograsso, a metallurgist at the Ames National Laboratory in Iowa and the director of the Critical Materials Institute , a Department of Energy research center. Researchers are investigating everything from reducing the amount of waste produced during the ore processing to improving the efficiency of rare earth element separation, which can also cut down on the amount of toxic waste. Scientists are also testing alternatives to mining, such as recycling rare earths from old electronics or recovering them from coal waste.
Much of this research is in partnership with the mining industry, whose buy-in is key, Lograsso says. Mining companies have to be willing to invest in making changes. “We want to make sure that the science and innovations that we do are driven by industry needs, so that we’re not here developing solutions that nobody really wants,” he says.
Klinger says she’s cautiously optimistic that the rare earth mining industry can become less polluting and more sustainable, if such solutions are widely adopted. “A lot of gains come from the low-hanging fruit,” she says. Even basic hardware upgrades to improve insulation can reduce the fuel required to reach the high temperatures needed for some processing. “You do what you [can].”
Between the jagged peaks of California’s Clark range and the Nevada border sits a broad, flat, shimmering valley known as the Ivanpah Dry Lake. Some 8,000 years ago, the valley held water year-round. Today, like many such playas in the Mojave Desert, the lake is ephemeral, winking into appearance only after an intense rain and flash flooding. It’s a beautiful, stark place, home to endangered desert tortoises and rare desert plants like Mojave milkweed.
From about 1984 to 1998, the Ivanpah Dry Lake was also a holding pen for wastewater piped in from Mountain Pass. The wastewater was a by-product of chemical processing to concentrate the rare earth elements in the mined rock, making it more marketable to companies that could then extract those elements to make specific products. Via a buried pipeline, the mine sent wastewater to evaporation ponds about 23 kilometers away, in and around the dry lake bed.
A small number of countries currently mine for rare earth elements (shown). But rare earth resources have been identified in many other locations, including Vietnam, Turkey and Greenland.
The pipeline repeatedly ruptured over the years. At least 60 separate spills dumped an estimated 2,000 metric tons of wastewater containing radioactive thorium into the valley. Federal officials feared that local residents and visitors to the nearby Mojave National Preserve might be at risk of exposure to that thorium, which could lead to increased risk of lung, pancreatic and other cancers.
Unocal Corporation, which had acquired Molycorp in 1977, was ordered to clean up the spill in 1997, and the company paid over $1.4 million in fines and settlements. Chemical processing of the raw ore ground to a halt. Mining operations stopped shortly afterward.
Half a world away, another environmental disaster was unfolding. The vast majority — between 80 and 90 percent — of rare earth elements on the market since the 1990s have come from China. One site alone, the massive Bayan Obo mine in Inner Mongolia, accounted for 45 percent of rare earth production in 2019.
Bayan Obo spans some 4,800 hectares, about half the size of Florida’s Walt Disney World resort. It is also one of the most heavily polluted places on Earth. Clearing the land to dig for ore meant removing vegetation in an area already prone to desertification, allowing the Gobi Desert to creep southward.
In 2010, officials in the nearby city of Baotou noted that radioactive, arsenic- and fluorine-containing mine waste, or tailings, was being dumped on farmland and into local water supplies, as well as into the nearby Yellow River. The air was polluted by fumes and toxic dust that reduced visibility. Residents complained of nausea, dizziness, migraines and arthritis. Some had skin lesions and discolored teeth, signs of prolonged exposure to arsenic; others exhibited signs of brittle bones, indications of skeletal fluorosis, Klinger says.
The country’s rare earth industry was causing “severe damage to the ecological environment,” China’s State Council wrote in 2010. The release of heavy metals and other pollutants during mining led to “the destruction of vegetation and pollution of surface water, groundwater and farmland.” The “excessive rare earth mining,” the council wrote, led to landslides and clogged rivers.
Faced with these mounting environmental disasters, as well as fears that it was depleting its rare earth resources too rapidly, China slashed its export of the elements in 2010 by 40 percent. The new limits sent prices soaring and kicked off concern around the globe that China had too tight of a stranglehold on these must-have elements. That, in turn, sparked investment in rare earth mining elsewhere.
In 2010, there were few other places mining rare earths, with only minimal production from India, Brazil and Malaysia. A new mine in remote Western Australia came online in 2011, owned by mining company Lynas. The company dug into fossilized lava preserved within an ancient volcano called Mount Weld.
Mount Weld didn’t have anywhere near the same sort of environmental impact seen in China: Its location was too remote and the mine was just a fraction of the size of Bayan Obo, according to Saleem Ali, an environmental planner at the University of Delaware. The United States, meanwhile, was eager to once again have its own source of rare earths — and Mountain Pass was still the best prospect.
After the Ivanpah Dry Lake mess, the Mountain Pass mine changed hands again. Chevron purchased it in 2005, but did not resume operations. Then, in 2008, a newly formed company called Molycorp Minerals purchased the mine with ambitious plans to create a complete rare earth supply chain in the United States.
The goal was not just mining and processing ore, but also separating out the desirable elements and even manufacturing them into magnets. Currently, the separations and magnet manufacturing are done overseas, mostly in China. The company also proposed a plan to avoid spilling wastewater into nearby fragile habitats. Molycorp resumed mining, and introduced a “dry tailings” process — a method to squeeze 85 percent of the water out of its mine waste, forming a thick paste. The company would then store the immobilized, pasty residue in lined pits on its own land and recycle the water back into the facility.
Unfortunately, Molycorp “was an epic debacle” from a business perspective, says Matt Sloustcher, senior vice president of communications and policy at MP Materials , current owner of Mountain Pass mine. Mismanagement ultimately led Molycorp to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015. MP Materials bought the mine in 2017 and resumed mining later that year. By 2022, Mountain Pass mine was producing 15 percent of the world’s rare earths.
MP Materials, too, has an ambitious agenda with plans to create a complete supply chain. And the company is determined not to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors. “We have a world-class … unbelievable deposit, an untapped potential,” says Michael Rosenthal, MP Materials’ chief operating officer. “We want to support a robust and diverse U.S. supply chain, be the magnetics champion in the U.S.”
On a hot morning in August, Sloustcher stands at the edge of the Mountain Pass mine, a giant hole in the ground, 800 meters across and up to 183 meters deep, big enough to be visible from space. It’s an impressive sight, and a good vantage point from which to describe a vision for the future. He points out the various buildings: where the ore is crushed and ground, where the ground rocks are chemically treated to slough off as much non–rare earth material as possible, and where the water is squeezed from that waste and the waste is placed into lined ponds.
The end result is a highly concentrated rare earth oxide ore — still nowhere near the magnet-making stage. But the company has a three-stage plan “to restore the full rare earth supply to the United States,” from “mine to magnet,” Rosenthal says. Stage 1, begun in 2017, was to restart mining, crushing and concentrating the ore. Stage 2 will culminate in the chemical separation of the rare earth elements. And stage 3 will be magnet production, he says.
In the mid-20th century, the U.S. Mountain Pass mine was the world’s top source for rare earth oxides. China began to dominate global production in the 1990s. In the last decade, the return of Mountain Pass along with the opening of Australia’s Mount Weld and production in Myanmar, Brazil and other locations have begun to shift that balance.
Since coming online in 2017, MP Materials has shipped its concentrated ore to China for the next steps, including the arduous, hazardous process of separating the elements from one another. But in November, the company announced to investors that it had begun the preliminary steps for stage 2, a “major milestone” on the way to realizing its mine-to-magnet ambitions.
With investments from the U.S. Department of Defense , the company is building two separations facilities. One plant will pull out lighter rare earth elements — those with smaller atomic numbers, including neodymium and praseodymium, both of which are key ingredients in the permanent magnets that power electric vehicles and many consumer electronics. MP Materials has additional grant money from the DOD to design and build a second processing plant to split apart the heavier rare earth elements such as dysprosium, also an ingredient in magnets, and yttrium, used to make superconductors and lasers.
Like stage 2, stage 3 is already under way. In 2022, the company broke ground in Fort Worth, Texas, for a facility to produce neodymium magnets. And it inked a deal with General Motors to supply those magnets for electric vehicle motors.
But separating the elements comes with its own set of environmental concerns.
The process is difficult and leads to lots of waste. Rare earth elements are extremely similar chemically, which means they tend to stick together. Forcing them apart requires multiple sequential steps and a variety of powerful solvents to separate them one by one. Caustic sodium hydroxide causes cerium to drop out of the mix, for example. Other steps involve solutions containing organic molecules called ligands, which have a powerful thirst for metal atoms. The ligands can selectively bind to particular rare earth elements and pull them out of the mix.
But one of the biggest issues plaguing this extraction process is its inefficiency, says Santa Jansone-Popova, an organic chemist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The scavenging of these metals is slow and imperfect, and companies have to go through a lot of extraction steps to get a sufficiently marketable amount of the elements. With the current chemical methods, “you need many, many, many stages in order to achieve the desired separation,” Jansone-Popova says. That makes the whole process “more complex, more expensive, and [it] produces more waste.”
Under the aegis of the DOE’s Critical Materials Institute, Jansone-Popova and her colleagues have been hunting for a way to make the process more efficient, eliminating many of those steps. In 2022, the researchers identified a ligand that they say is much more efficient at snagging certain rare earths than the ligands now used in the industry. Industry partners are on board to try out the new process this year, she says.
In addition to concerns about heavy metals and other toxic materials in the waste, there are lingering worries about the potential impacts of radioactivity on human health. The trouble is that there is still only limited epidemiological evidence of the impact of rare earth mining on human and environmental health, according to Ali, and much of that evidence is related to the toxicity of heavy metals such as arsenic. It’s also not clear, he says, how much of the concerns over radioactive waste are scientifically supported, due to the low concentration of radioactive elements in mined rare earths.
Such concerns get international attention, however. In 2019, protests erupted in Malaysia over what activists called “a mountain of toxic waste,” about 1.5 million metric tons, produced by a rare earth separation facility near the Malaysian city of Kuantan. The facility is owned by Lynas, which ships its rare earth ore from Australia’s Mount Weld to the site. To dissolve the rare earths, the ore is cooked with sulfuric acid and then diluted with water. The residue that’s left behind can contain traces of radioactive thorium.
Lynas had no permanent storage for the waste, piling it up in hills near Kuantan instead. But the alarm over the potential radioactivity in those hills may be exaggerated, experts say. Lynas reports that workers at the site are exposed to less than 1.05 millisieverts per year, far below the radiation exposure threshold for workers of 20 millisieverts set by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“There’s a lot of misinformation about byproducts such as thorium.… The thorium from rare earth processing is actually very low-level radiation,” Ali says. “As someone who has been a committed environmentalist, I feel right now that there’s not much science-based decision making on these things.”
Given the concerns over new mining, environmental think tanks like the World Resources Institute have been calling for more recycling of existing rare earth materials to reduce the need for new mining and processing.
“The path to the future has to do with getting the most out of what we take out of the ground,” says Bustamante, of the NRDC. “Ultimately the biggest lever for change is not in the mining itself, but in the manufacturing, and what we do with those materials at the end of life.”
That means using mined resources as efficiently as possible, but also recycling rare earths out of already existing materials. Getting more out of these materials can reduce the overall environmental impacts of the mining itself, she adds.
That is a worthwhile goal, but recycling isn’t a silver bullet, Ali says. For one thing, there aren’t enough spent rare earth–laden batteries and other materials available at the moment for recycling. “Some mining will be necessary, [because] right now we don’t have the stock.” And that supply problem, he adds, will only grow as demand increases.
Carolyn Gramling is the earth & climate writer. She has bachelor’s degrees in geology and European history and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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The James Webb Space Telescope’s first image captured three “Green Pea” galaxies in the early universe (circled in green). The galaxies’ light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe, making them appear red.
Galaxies that helped transform the early universe may have been small, round and green.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted “Green Pea” galaxies dating to 13.1 billion years ago . These viridescent runts, spotted just 700 million years after the Big Bang, might have helped trigger one of the greatest makeovers in cosmic history, astronomers said at a January 9 news conference in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting.
Green Peas first showed up in 2009 in images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious project to map much of the sky. Citizen science volunteers gave the objects their colorful name. Their greenish hue is because most of their light comes from glowing gas clouds, rather than directly from stars.
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These galaxies are rare in the present-day universe. Astronomers think that the ones that do exist are analogs of galaxies that were more plentiful in the early universe.
“They’re a bit like living fossils,” said astrophysicist James Rhoads of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Coelacanths, if you will,” referencing a fish thought to be extinct until it showed up off the coast of South Africa in 1938 ( SN: 12/2/11 ).
These galaxies leak much more ultraviolet light, which can rip electrons from atoms, than typical galaxies do. So Green Peas dating to the universe’s first billion years or so could be partly responsible for a dramatic and mysterious cosmic transition called reionization, when most of the hydrogen atoms in the early universe had their electrons torn away ( SN: 1/7/20 ).
Three ancient Green Peas turned up in JWST’s first image , released in July 2022 ( SN: 7/21/22 ). The objects look red in JWST’s infrared vision, but the wavelengths of light they emit are like those of the previously discovered Green Peas. The findings were also published in the Jan. 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters .
“This helps us explain how the universe reionized,” Rhoads said. “I think this is an important piece of the puzzle.”
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
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The amount of cholesterol that HDL particles carry, commonly reported on blood tests, doesn’t appear to be the most important detail when it comes to heart health.
“Good” and “bad” cholesterol: These well-known characters have long starred in the saga of heart health. But in a major plot twist, “good” cholesterol, it turns out, is not always so good.
In the last dozen years or so, research on the particles that carry so-called good cholesterol — known as high-density lipoprotein, or HDL — has presented a much more nuanced and conflicted story about HDL’s effect on cardiovascular disease.
And a new, large study brings fresh doubt. High levels of HDL cholesterol were not associated with protection against heart disease in Black or white participants, researchers reported in the November Journal of the American College of Cardiology. For low levels of HDL cholesterol, there was a split, with a link to higher risk of heart disease in white participants but not in Black participants.
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The study is the first to find a difference in the risk tied to low levels of HDL cholesterol between Black and white people. It also adds to accumulating evidence that a high level of HDL cholesterol isn’t necessarily helpful for one’s heart health.
There appear to be other attributes of HDL that can be good. But researchers have also found that HDL’s role in health is complicated and ever-changing, with plenty to figure out.
Cholesterol has long been explained as the “good” versus the “bad.” A high level of the “good” kind has been tied to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, while having lots of the “bad” kind — carried by low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, particles — has been linked to a higher risk.
One of the big reports to bestow HDL cholesterol with the label of “good” came out of the Framingham Heart Study, a government-led effort launched in 1948 to investigate risk factors for cardiovascular disease. In 1977, Framingham researchers reported an inverse relationship between HDL cholesterol and coronary disease risk in a group made up of white participants.
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A person’s HDL cholesterol level is just one part of the story, though. Commonly reported on blood tests, the level reflects the amount of cholesterol that HDL particles have on board. HDL carries cholesterol away from the arteries to the liver to be excreted. This helps keep cholesterol from building up in artery walls, which can eventually impede blood flow.
Recently, research on HDL has started looking beyond its cholesterol payload. “The big understanding over the last decade or so is that while you can measure the cholesterol, it doesn’t really reflect the actual functions that HDL is doing in the body,” says Anand Rohatgi, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
How well HDL removes cholesterol appears to matter. One measure of this job performance is HDL’s ability to receive cholesterol from a type of cell called a macrophage. In a U.S. study of close to 3,000 adults, 49 percent who were Black, the higher this capacity, the lower the incidence of heart attacks or strokes, Rohatgi and colleagues reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2014.
Ridding the body of cholesterol is just one of HDL’s many jobs. HDL also has anti-inflammatory and other protective effects that appear to guard against cardiovascular disease. But even these effects don’t always lead to a net good. In certain circumstances, HDL can become dysfunctional, such that its capacity to receive cholesterol is reduced , and it contributes to inflammation. The fact that HDL’s roles can change, depending on the context, has made studying HDL particles challenging, Rohatgi says.
How well HDL performs is still far from something that can be tested as part of a regular physical exam. It’s not clear “how to do it yet for the general public,” says Nathalie Pamir, a researcher who studies cardiology at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.
As researchers work toward a fuller understanding of HDL and how it might be better used as a clinical measure, the view of HDL cholesterol as uniformly “good” is still out there. And one’s HDL cholesterol level is still one entry in a widely used calculator that estimates cardiovascular risk. Pamir and her colleagues wanted to examine what high and low HDL cholesterol levels mean in a contemporary, diverse population.
In the new study, the team analyzed data from the REGARDS trial, designed to study potential regional and racial differences in death from stroke in the United States. The study included nearly 24,000 participants — of which 42 percent were Black — who did not start out with coronary heart disease. Over roughly 10 years, 664 out of 10,095 Black participants and 951 out of 13,806 white participants had a heart attack or died from one.
Increased levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol were tied to a higher risk of coronary heart disease, in line with past research, the team found. But for HDL cholesterol, high levels weren’t protective for anyone, and low levels were only predictive of higher risk in white people. That finding suggests it may be necessary to revisit how HDL cholesterol is used in the cardiovascular disease risk calculator, Pamir says.
Rather than just good, HDL cholesterol “is complicated,” she says. If a patient has high HDL cholesterol, a doctor “can say, ‘well, currently we don’t know what that means.’”
Although the study suggests that the impact of HDL cholesterol levels on disease risk may differ by race, it’s important to remember that race is a social construct, not a biological one, says Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Some of the risk factors for coronary heart disease, including high blood pressure and smoking, “are more prevalent in self-described Black Americans,” he says. And a community’s access to health care, nutritious food and opportunities for education and employment can influence those risk factors ( SN: 5/15/17 ). “There is something unique about place and the history of place which may predispose to the burden of hypertension, obesity, even diabetes,” Yancy says.
It will take more research to understand what’s behind the potential race-based difference that the study reports, Yancy says, and what it means in terms of HDL cholesterol levels and cardiovascular disease risk. But it remains the case that high levels of LDL cholesterol — which can accumulate in artery walls — are associated with an increased risk, he says. “The LDL cholesterol seems to be our most relevant barometer.”
For all that is known about what impacts cardiovascular disease risk, researchers still don’t have the full picture. The number of times that cardiologists see heart attacks in patients with normal cholesterol levels and normal blood pressure, Yancy says, suggests that, with current methods, “we’re not able to capture the entirety of the risk.”
Aimee Cunningham is the biomedical writer. She has a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.
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Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Living through the COVID-19 pandemic may have matured teens’ brains beyond their years.
From online schooling and social isolation to economic hardship and a mounting death count, the last few years have been rough on young people. For teens, the pandemic and its many side effects came during a crucial window in brain development.
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This research, published December 1 in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science , is the first to look at the impact of the pandemic on brain aging.
The finding reveals that “the pandemic hasn’t been bad just in terms of mental health for adolescents,” says Ian Gotlib, a clinical neuroscientist at Stanford University. “It seems to have altered their brains as well.”
The study can’t link those brain changes to poor mental health during the pandemic. But “we know there is a relationship between adversity and the brain as it tries to adapt to what it’s been given,” says Beatriz Luna, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, who wasn’t involved in the research. “I think this is a very important study that sets the ball rolling for us to look at this.”
The roots of this study date back to nearly a decade ago, when Gotlib and his colleagues launched a project in California’s Bay Area to study depression in adolescents. The researchers were collecting information on the mental health of the kids in the study, and did MRI scans of their brains.
Lockdown orders in the spring of 2020 forced the researchers to stop the project. When they restarted a year later, Gotlib worried that stress from the pandemic threatened to skew their results.
It turned out that the kids making their way back to the study after a year of pandemic life were reporting higher rates of anxiety and depression than their peers from before 2020. So, the team decided to compare brain scans captured before the start of the pandemic with scans taken between October 2020 and March 2022.
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The researchers looked at differences in 64 scans from each group, matched by the kids’ sex and age, with an average age of around 16 for each group.
The results were “striking,” Gotlib says.
Adolescent brains naturally go through a maturation process that results in the thickening of the hippocampus, an area involved with memory and concentration, and the amygdala, which regulates emotional processing. At the same time, the cortex — an area that regulates emotional functioning — starts thinning.
The brain scans revealed that this maturation process had moved more quickly in teens who had lived through the pandemic. Gotlib says that their brains appeared three to four years older than the brains of the teens scanned before the start of the pandemic.
Exactly what part of the pandemic may have shaped teen brains is unclear. But “this study shows that the pandemic has had a material impact on brain maturation,” says Joan Luby, a child psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Gotlib suspects that stress is to blame. Previous studies have shown that exposure to violence or negligence can lead to accelerated brain maturation in children. Considering that mental health plummeted for teens during the pandemic ( SN: 9/8/22 ), “it’s not a big leap” to think that the stressful conditions could also have shaped brain development in his study’s cohort, Gotlib says.
But what caused the alterations and what implications they may have are still open questions. Rudolf Uher, a neuroscientist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, points out that other factors like more screen time due to online schooling could be at play. And he cautions that future research may not back up this study’s findings.
And it’s unclear whether accelerated brain aging has impacted teen health, or if issues will manifest later in life. While researchers can’t say for sure, “if your brain is prematurely aging, that’s generally not a good thing,” Luby says.
Either way, ensuring that people have access to mental health services will be crucial to helping children of the pandemic, Gotlib says.
“These kids are hurting,” he says. “We need to take that seriously and make sure we’re offering them treatment.”
Freda Kreier was a fall 2021 intern at Science News . She holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from Colorado College and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
A spaceship diving into a wormhole (illustrated) is never returning, but it could theoretically send back video from the other side before the hole closes behind it.
If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole in space, you won’t be coming back. It will snap shut behind you. But you may have just enough time to send a message to the rest of us from the other side, researchers report in the Nov. 15 Physical Review D .
No one has yet seen a wormhole , but theoretically they could provide shortcuts to distant parts of the universe, or to other universes entirely, if they exist ( SN: 7/27/17 ). Physicists have long known that one of the most commonly studied types of wormholes would be extremely unstable and would collapse if any matter entered it. It wasn’t clear, though, just how fast that might happen or what it means for something, or someone, heading into it.
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Now, a new computer program shows how one type of wormhole would respond when something travels through it.
“You build a probe and you send it through” in the wormhole simulation, says Ben Kain, a physicist at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. “You’re not necessarily trying to get it to come back, because you know the wormhole is going to collapse — but could a light signal get back in time before a collapse? And we found that it is possible.”
Prior studies of wormholes have concluded that the cosmic passageways could potentially stay open for repeated trips back and forth, Kain says, provided they’re supported by a form of matter that’s so exotic it’s called “ghost matter.”
Theoretically, ghost matter responds to gravity in exactly the opposite way to normal matter. That is, a ghost matter apple would fall up from a tree branch instead of down. While allowed by Einstein’s theory of general relativity , ghost matter almost certainly doesn’t exist in reality, Kain says ( SN: 2/3/21) .
Nevertheless, Kain simulated ghost matter traveling through a wormhole and found that it caused the hole to expand as expected, rather than collapsing.
It was a different story with anything made of normal matter; that would trigger a collapse that pinches the hole closed and leaves something resembling a black hole behind, Kain’s simulation confirmed. But it would happen slowly enough for a fast-moving probe to transmit light-speed signals back to our side just before the wormhole completely closes.
Kain doesn’t imagine ever sending humans through a wormhole, if such things are ever found. “Just the capsule and a video camera. It’s all automated,” he says. It’ll be a one-way trip, “but we can at least get some video seeing what this device sees.”
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The idea should be approached with a fair bit of skepticism, says physicist Sabine Hossenfelder of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. “[It] requires one to postulate the existence of [things] that for all we know do not exist…. Lots of things you can do mathematically have nothing to do with reality.”
Still, Kain says, it’s a valuable effort that might reveal ways to make wormholes that don’t rely on ghost matter to stay open long enough for us to travel back and forth throughout the universe or beyond.
K. Calhoun, B. Fay and B. Kain. Matter traveling through a wormhole . Physical Review D . Vol. 106, November 15, 2022, 104054. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevD.106.104054.
James Riordon is a freelance science writer who covers physics, math, astronomy and occasional lifestyle stories.
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Unlike a lot of the “firsts” among Black Americans earning a Ph.D. in particular fields of science, the first Black evolutionary biologist Ph.D., Joseph L. Graves Jr., is alive and telling his story.
It’s both good and bad that the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology is not a long-ago hidden figure but a contemporary scientist. On the upside, there’s no agonizing over papers no one saved, no stitching together other people’s memoirs to guess what pioneering might have felt like. Instead, Joseph L. Graves Jr., who finished his degree in 1988, tells his story himself in A Voice in the Wilderness .
But evolutionary biology’s first Black Ph.D. in 1988? That “first” came late even considering that the field took a while to declare itself a specialty. The Society for the Study of Evolution didn’t form until 1946.
Long before that, U.S. Black biologists had started cracking the glass ceiling of academic credentials. Graves credits Alfred O. Coffin as the first Black American to earn a biological Ph.D., awarded in 1889. He began a slow, intermittent series of Black Ph.D. biologists, who also struggled to get jobs befitting their credentials. Even now, while nearly 14 percent of the U.S. population is Black, Black scientists make up only about 3 percent of the resident Ph.D.s working in a biological discipline.
Showing how racism narrows the gateways to science becomes a major theme in A Voice in the Wilderness as Graves describes his own twisty, bruising path to becoming a “first.” Yet he declares that the book isn’t an autobiography but a call to embrace evolutionary science as crucial to the times we live in. Voice feels like a long, candid, free-flowing conversation. Graves mixes in bitter and sweet childhood memories, the lab challenges of coaxing insects to fly in place, quick math and science explainers, enthusiastic accounts of the scientific questions that drew him to the field, vignettes from his political activism, his alienation from and return to Christianity, some Star Trek …
Graves has already published on why Black evolutionary biologists are rare , lamenting the longtime lack of an inclusive culture and the few, often barely visible, role models. Also, evolutionary biology has baggage. He described in his 2001 book, The Emperor’s New Clothes , a long whack-a-mole history of serial racist pseudoscience. Polygeny, for instance, a popular 19th century delusion, held that races had independent origins and were separate species. In the 20th century, the selective breeding notions of eugenics supposedly justified forced sterilizations and exterminations to purge unwanted traits as if people were livestock. Misuse of science continues, though Graves highlights a few heroes who have summoned science to fight the perversions.
Black talent in the United States long contributed to science without Ph.D.s, but breaking through the barriers to earn the formal credentials was also a major achievement. Alfred O. Coffin is credited as the first Ph.D. biologist, earning his degree in 1889. Here are examples of other pioneering Black Ph.D.s (from a 1997 accounting ). New scholarship may unearth even earlier pioneers but being second or third was still hard work.
1876: Physicist Edward Alexander Bouchet
1907: Entomologist Charles Henry Turner
1915: Physiologist Julian Herman Lewis
1916: Chemist St. Elmo Brady
1921: Botanist Thomas Wyatt Turner
1925: Mathematician Elbert Frank Cox
1930: Anatomist Roscoe Lewis McKinney
1942: Geologist Marguerite Thomas Williams
Source: C. Titcomb/ The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 1997
Graves’ own path was not easy. His parents were born in 1920s Virginia. His grandfather started the migration north after a tip that the Ku Klux Klan was about to target him. His moonshine was getting too competitive with white suppliers’.
“Both my parents grew up under the constant threat of the lynch rope should they in any way sass a white person,” Graves writes. He was born in New Jersey in 1955. “Four months after I was born, young Emmett Till was lynched in Money, Mississippi, for supposedly doing just that.”
Graves attended largely white-majority schools that didn’t see his potential. His mother, Helen, was the advocate who won him his education. For instance, she fought back when his elementary school pushed to move him into “special education.” Then in third grade, eye tests revealed that what he really needed were glasses. New possibilities dawned.
Another critical boost came from a student teacher who noticed that the library books he read were more complicated than his classmates’ reading. At the age of 13, for instance, he was fascinated by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and wowed by Karl Marx’s Manifesto.
At another turning point, he convinced some kids playing chess to let him have a try. He lost badly but found two chess books in the library that he devoured that night. “In hindsight, I credit chess with being the most important factor changing the trajectory of my life,” he writes. He played on the school team and made lifelong friends.
His path through higher education got complicated. He went to Oberlin College in Ohio because its recruiting brochures had pictures of students who looked like him. There were still some tough spots. He and many other students struggled with freshman physics. Yet, as far as he could tell, he and the class’s other Black student were the only ones to get their final exams back marked, “You have no talent for physics, you should never take another physics class at this college.” Graves avoided physics, but the other student went on to earn a physics Ph.D. at MIT.
While studying parasites for his master’s degree, Graves discovered that his ability to spot weaknesses in current knowledge, which led him to overthink exam answers in his earlier school days, became a strength in research.
For his Ph.D., at first he wanted to go to Harvard University despite his experiences on campus visits. He recalls “European American students coming back and locking their offices or removing valuables from sight when I walked through the common area.”
The National Science Foundation awarded him a fellowship in 1979, not just honoring his talent but offering schools the catnip of full funding for his tuition and support. “I suspect I am the only person in the history of the [fellowship] to be rejected for admission to a graduate program in the same year the award was made,” he writes. Harvard informed him that he was qualified but that no one could be found to advise him.
So he happily plunged into the intellectual fizz of the University of Michigan. Yet passionate political activism eventually pulled him away. He organized efforts to stop Klan threats against Black Americans moving into Detroit suburbs. He went to the United Kingdom to stand arm in arm with the wives of striking miners as police charged them.
Even after Black Americans began earning Ph.D.s , finding a faculty position at highly ranked, white-majority universities was just about impossible for decades. Harvard University’s dental school, one of the rare white-majority dental schools to take Black students, hired one of its own graduates, George F. Grant, in 1870. A survey published in 2007 , however, didn’t find other examples of openly Black teaching faculty scholars at high-profile, white-majority schools — in any academic discipline — until 72 years later. Here’s a sampling of when a few select schools hired their first Black faculty.
1870: George F. Grant – Harvard University
1942: W. Allison Davis – University of Chicago
1952: Joseph T. Gier – University of California, Berkeley
1953: William F. Strother – Princeton University
1956: Joseph R. Applegate – MIT
1962: Michael G. Cooke – Yale University
1970: James Lowell Gibbs Jr. – Stanford University
Source: The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 2007–2008
Graves returned to academics and finished his Ph.D. in 1988 at Wayne State University in Detroit. His career took off as he worked on the evolutionary genetics of aging, and in 1994 he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Today, he’s a professor at North Carolina A&T State University, a historically Black school.
In keeping with his activist past, Graves uses his evolutionary expertise to fight racism that claims a basis in science and to advocate for a culture that values scientific reasoning. The book’s title comes from the biblical phrase, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’” It has become a metaphor, Graves says, “for any perspective of great importance and truth that has been silenced to maintain the status quo.” He is far from silenced.
Susan Milius is the life sciences writer, covering organismal biology and evolution, and has a special passion for plants, fungi and invertebrates. She studied biology and English literature.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
