The New York Times reports: Some of Earth's plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms -- about 700 are known -- flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die....

The plants not only collect the soil's minerals into their bodies but seem to hoard them to "ridiculous" levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne who has researched the relationship between plants and their soils since the 1970s. This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants...?

On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, Dr. Baker and an international team of colleagues have proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets. Now, as the team scales up to the world's largest trial at nearly 50 acres, their target audience is industry. In a decade, the researchers hope that a sizable portion of insatiable consumer demand for base metals and rare minerals could be filled by the same kind of farming that produces the world's coconuts and coffee... [T]he technology has the additional value of enabling areas with toxic soils to be made productive...

Now, after decades behind the lock and key of patents, Dr. Baker said, "the brakes are off the system."
Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 adds "This process, called phytomining, cannot supplant the scale of traditional mining, but could make a dent in the world's demand for nickel, cobalt, and zinc.

"Small-holding farmers could earn more from phytomining than from coaxing food crops from metal-laden soils. Using these plants could also help clean brownfields left over from prior industrial use."

UPDATE: (2/29/2020) Saturday U.S. health officials confirmed the first American death from coronavirus.

And the Boston Globe's Stat News site reports that the new coronavirus "may be spreading in parts of the Pacific Northwest, with California, Oregon, and Washington State reporting Friday that they have diagnosed cases with no travel history or known contact with another case...." Problems with a coronavirus test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have meant that little testing for the new virus has been done in the U.S. Worried infectious diseases experts have warned that the lack of apparent cases in the country cannot be taken as a sign the virus isn't spreading, undetected in some places...

The discovery that the virus may be spreading in the country should not come as a surprise, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. "It just tells us where there is testing, there are cases. And that's what we have to understand," Osterholm said. "There is no such thing as a barrier containment to keep these out. It's going to happen. And what we have to do now is get on with how we're going to deal with them...."

Dr. Sara Cody, health officer for Santa Clara County, said individuals need to start practicing good hand hygiene and learn to stop touching their faces -- people can infect themselves if they pick up viruses off a contaminated surface, then put a finger in their mouth or rub their eyes or nose.

Scientists have detected evidence of a colossal explosion in space -- five times bigger than anything observed before. A reader shares a report: The huge release of energy is thought to have emanated from a supermassive black hole some 390 million light years from Earth. The eruption is said to have left a giant dent in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Researchers reported their findings [PDF] in The Astrophysical Journal. "I've tried to put this explosion into human terms and it's really, really difficult," co-author Melanie Johnston-Hollitt told BBC News. "The best I can do is tell you that if this explosion continued to occur over the 240 million years of the outburst -- which it probably didn't, but anyway -- it'd be like setting off 20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second for the entire 240 million years. So that's incomprehensibly big. Huge."

World Health Organization officials said Friday they are increasing the risk assessment of the coronavirus, which has spread to at least 49 countries in a matter of weeks, to "very high" at a global level. From a report: "We are on the highest level of alert or highest level of risk assessment in terms of spread and in terms of impact," said Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO's health emergencies program. The group isn't trying to alarm or scare people, he said. "This is a reality check for every government on the planet: Wake up. Get ready. This virus may be on its way and you need to be ready. You have a duty to your citizens, you have a duty to the world to be ready." The world can still avoid "the worst of it," but the increased risk assessment means the WHO's "level of concern is at its highest," he said at a press conference at WHO headquarters in Geneva. World leaders still have a chance to contain the virus within their borders, Ryan said. "To wait, to be complacent to be caught unawares at this point, it's really not much of an excuse."

darenw shares a report: Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth's environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96. His daughter Mia Dyson confirmed the death. As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper -- worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize -- that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great achievements of modern science. But it was as a writer and technological visionary that he gained public renown.

He imagined exploring the solar system with spaceships propelled by nuclear explosions and establishing distant colonies nourished by genetically engineered plants. "Life begins at 55, the age at which I published my first book," he wrote in "From Eros to Gaia," one of the collections of his writings that appeared while he was a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton -- an august position for someone who finished school without a Ph.D. The lack of a doctorate was a badge of honor, he said. With his slew of honorary degrees and a fellowship in the Royal Society, people called him Dr. Dyson anyway. Further reading: Slashdot's interview with Freeman Dyson (2013).

Senator Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in this year's presidential election, has put forth the most audacious climate plan among the contenders. But there are doubts about the political and economic feasibility of his sweeping vision, as well as the wisdom of some of his particular technical proposals. From a report: Notably, the plan restricts tools that could help rapidly cut greenhouse-gas emissions, including nuclear power and technologies that can capture carbon dioxide. Sanders wants to pump more than $16 trillion into a version of the Green New Deal that would eliminate emissions from the US power sector, as well as all ground transportation, within a decade. To pull it off, he wants the government to play a much larger role in the electricity sector. His plan would direct new or expanded federal agencies to build nearly $2.5 trillion worth of wind, solar, geothermal, and energy storage projects.

The plan would also force major changes on the fossil-fuel sector, including ending federal subsidies, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and the import and export of fossil fuels. He'd also direct federal agencies to investigate whether companies broke the law in covering up their role in climate change, or owe damages for the destruction they cause. In addition, Sanders wants to invest more than $2 trillion to help families and small businesses improve the energy efficiency of their homes, buildings, and operations; and more than $1 trillion to retrofit or construct bridges, roads, water systems, and coastal protections in ways that will stand up to harsher climate conditions. He says the plan will create 20 million jobs, while offering wage guarantees, job training, and other assistance to displaced energy workers. His broader goals for the Green New Deal go beyond climate and clean energy as well, boosting funding for affordable housing and rural economic development, and enhancing protections for civil rights, environmental justice, and labor.

Zeynep Tufekci, writing for Scientific American: Preparing for the almost inevitable global spread of this virus, now dubbed COVID-19, is one of the most pro-social, altruistic things you can do in response to potential disruptions of this kind. We should prepare, not because we may feel personally at risk, but so that we can help lessen the risk for everyone. We should prepare not because we are facing a doomsday scenario out of our control, but because we can alter every aspect of this risk we face as a society. That's right, you should prepare because your neighbors need you to prepare -- especially your elderly neighbors, your neighbors who work at hospitals, your neighbors with chronic illnesses, and your neighbors who may not have the means or the time to prepare because of lack of resources or time.

Prepper and survivalist subcultures are often associated with doomsday scenarios and extreme steps: people stocking and hoarding supplies, building bunkers and preparing to go off the grid so that they may survive some untold catastrophe, brandishish weapons to guard their compound while their less prepared neighbors perish. All this appears both extreme and selfish, and, to be honest, a little nutty -- just check the title of the TV series devoted to the subculture: Doomsday Preppers, implying, well, a doomsday and the few prepared individuals surviving in a war-of-all-against-all world. It also feels like a scam: there is no shortage of snake oil sellers who hope stoking such fears will make people buy more supplies: years' worth of ready-to-eat meals, bunker materials and a lot more stuff in various shades of camo. (The more camo the more doomsday feels, I guess!) The reality is that there is little point "preparing" for the most catastrophic scenarios some of these people envision. As a species, we live and die by our social world and our extensive infrastructure -- and there is no predicting what anybody needs in the face of total catastrophe. In contrast, the real crisis scenarios we're likely to encounter require cooperation and, crucially, "flattening the curve" of the crisis exactly so the more vulnerable can fare better, so that our infrastructure will be less stressed at any one time.

Federal health employees interacted with Americans quarantined for possible exposure to the coronavirus without proper medical training or protective gear then scattered into the general population, The New York Times reported Thursday, citing a government whistle-blower. From the report: In a portion of a complaint filing obtained by The New York Times that has been submitted to the Office of the Special Counsel, the whistle-blower, described as a senior leader at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the team was "improperly deployed" to two military bases in California to assist the processing of Americans who had been evacuated from coronavirus hot zones in China and elsewhere.

The staff members were sent to Travis Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base and were ordered to enter quarantined areas, including a hangar where coronavirus evacuees were being received. They were not provided training in safety protocols until five days later, the person said. Without proper training or equipment, some of the exposed staff members moved freely around and off the bases, with at least one person staying in a nearby hotel and leaving California on a commercial flight. Many were unaware of the need to test their temperature three times a day.

The fight to contain the coronavirus entered an alarming new phase on Thursday as caseloads soared in Europe and the Middle East, and health officials in the United States and Germany dealt with patients with no known connection to others with the infection. From a report: The German and American cases raised the possibility that the virus could have begun to spread locally, or that infected people had spread it to others sequentially, making it virtually impossible to trace and isolate the origins. Either way, the cases, thousands of miles apart, underscored how quickly the virus was making its way around the globe after emerging in China. Japan's government closed all schools through March in an effort to combat the outbreak. Iran canceled Friday Prayers in major cities, a cornerstone ritual of the Islamic Republic. Saudi Arabia barred pilgrims from visiting Mecca and Medina.

President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence would lead the American effort to combat the virus, but the administration continued to send mixed messages. Public health officials warned of potentially "major disruptions," while Mr. Trump blamed Democrats and cable news channels for overstating the threat. Financial markets continued their weeklong declines. In the Middle East, concerns built about the growing severity of the outbreak in Iran, the source of infections in many other countries. The government said on Thursday that 245 people had been infected and 26 had died, but experts say there are probably many more cases. Several countries registered new infections that illustrated the diverse ways the pathogen could cross borders.

The Chang'e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. From a report: China's robotic Chang'e-4 spacecraft did something last year that had never been done before: It landed on the moon's far side, and Yutu-2, a small rover it was carrying, began trundling through a crater there. One of the rover's instruments, a ground-penetrating radar, is now revealing what lies beneath. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, a team of Chinese and Italian researchers showed that the top layer of the lunar soil on that part of the moon is considerably thicker than some expected -- about 130 feet of what scientists call regolith.

"It's a fine, dusty, sandy environment," said Elena Pettinelli, a professor of mathematics and physics at Rome Tre University who was one of the authors of the paper. Based on what NASA astronauts observed during the Apollo moon landings, other scientists said they would have expected one-quarter as much soil. "That's a lot of regolith," said David A. Kring, a senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston who is not involved with the Chinese moon mission. "That's food for thought." Chang'e-4 landed just over a year ago inside Von Karman crater, a 110-mile-wide depression, and continues to explore a part of the moon that has not been seen up close before.

A reader shares a report from Space.com: Ries Crater, or Nordlinger Ries, is located in western Bavaria, Germany, and formed roughly 15 million years ago, when a meteorite struck. This site has incredibly well-preserved rocks and minerals that bear similarities to the Martian surface. Therefore, samples from this impact site on Earth may shed light on Mars' past, according to a new study. Today, Mars is too cold to host liquid water on its surface, which is a requirement for life as we know it on Earth. However, 4 billion years ago, Mars may have been warm enough for surface oceans and, possibly, life, according to the study.

The researchers studied rock samples from Ries Crater, which was once a body of water. Their findings show that the samples have a high pH based on the ratio of nitrogen isotopes, as well as a high alkalinity, which indicates an imbalanced pH level, according to the study. NASA's Mars 2020 rover is planned to land in a similar, well-preserved ancient crater that is believed to have also contained liquid water in its past. The findings suggest that the Martian crater will have a chemical composition comparable to that of Ries Crater. Therefore, studying the alkalinity, pH and nitrogen content of samples from the Ries Crater could help the researchers better understand the properties of ancient water on Mars and, in turn, determine the amount of carbon dioxide that was in the planet's atmosphere billions of years ago. Although complex life is unlikely, simpler microorganisms could have survived if water on Mars had a neutral pH level and was highly alkaline, the researchers said in the statement. These conditions would indicate that the atmosphere had enough carbon dioxide to warm the planet and make liquid water possible, the scientists added.

ClickOnThis writes: Many of us know the old joke about BMWs and hemorrhoids. Now it seems that science can back it up. In a study perhaps deserving of an Ig Nobel, scientists found that the likelihood a driver will stop for a pedestrian is inversely proportional to the value of their vehicle. CNN reports: "A new study has found that drivers of flashy vehicles are less likely to stop and allow pedestrians to cross the road -- with the likelihood they'll slow down decreasing by 3% for every extra $1,000 that their vehicle is worth. Researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas speculated that the expensive car owners 'felt a sense of superiority over other road users' and were less able to empathize with lowly sidewalk-dwellers.

They came to this conclusion after asking volunteers to cross a sidewalk hundreds of times, filming and analyzing the responses by car drivers. Researchers used one white and one black man, and one white and one black woman -- also finding that cars were more likely to yield for the white and female participants. Vehicles stopped 31% of the time for both women and white participants, compared with 24% of the time for men and 25% of the time for black volunteers. But the best predictor of whether a car would stop was its cost, researchers discovered. 'Disengagement and a lower ability to interpret thoughts and feelings of others along with feelings of entitlement and narcissism may lead to a lack of empathy for pedestrians' among costly car owners, they theorized in the study." The research has been published in the Journal of Transport and Health.

The research "backed up a Finnish study published last month that found that men who own flashy vehicles are more likely to be 'argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic,'" adds CNN.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that a resident from Northern California has contracted the coronavirus without traveling outside the United States or coming in contact with another patient known to have the infection -- the first sign that the disease may be spreading within a local community. The Sacramento Bee reports: "It is a confirmed case. There is one in Northern California," CDC spokesman Scott Pauley told The Sacramento Bee just before 4 p.m. Wednesday. In the Northern California case, "the individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County. The individual had no known exposure to the virus through travel or close contact with a known infected individual," California Department of Public Health officials said in a news release Wednesday evening. State public health officials in Sacramento, citing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the case is the first person-to-person transmission of the COVID-19 virus.

Earlier cases of person-to-person transmission in Illinois and in San Benito County came "after close, prolonged interaction with a family member who returned from Wuhan, China, and had tested positive for COVID-19," California Department of Public Health officials said in their Wednesday statement. Dr. Sonia Angell, the state's public health officer, called the outbreak an "evolving situation" that the state had been monitoring since the first cases in China late last year. but added "there is a lot we already know." "We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California," Angell said in prepared remarks. Earlier today, President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence will lead the government's response to the virus. In the rare White House address, Trump maintained that the risk to the U.S. from the virus "remains very low."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An electronic device that "sniffs" breath may offer a new way to identify people with a condition that can lead to cancer of the oesophagus, researchers have revealed. According to the charity Cancer Research UK, people diagnosed with Barrett's oesophagus -- a precancerous condition in which cells lining the food pipe change and may grow abnormally -- have more than 11 times greater risk of getting a particular type of oesophageal cancer called oesophageal adenocarcinoma compared with the general population. Writing in the journal Gut, Siersema and colleagues reported how they tested their device on 402 patients who were scheduled to undergo an endoscopy. Among these patients, 129 went on to be diagnosed with Barrett's oesophagus, 141 had gastro-oesophageal reflux disease, and 132 had neither problem.

Before they underwent an endoscopy, each patient was asked to breath into an "electronic nose" -- a device that can detect different volatile molecules. In the breath, such molecules result from processes in the body, however while many of these occur in a healthy individual, some may be linked to particular diseases, either reflecting changes in cells or changes in the local community of microbes caused by a disease. As a result, a particular composition within a breath sample may act as a hallmark of a condition. The team's portable electronic nose incorporated a type of artificial intelligence to look for these patterns. [...] Overall the results reveal that the nose correctly identified patients with Barrett's oesophagus 91% of the time, while it correctly identified those without the condition 74% of the time. When the test was restricted to only those with either gastro-oesophageal reflux disease or Barrett's oesophagus, the system was still able to distinguish patients, albeit less accurately.

Starting next week, Starbucks will roll out its spring menu in stores across Canada that will include a breakfast sandwich with Beyond Meat sausage. Engadget reports: Starbucks joins a growing list of brands that have added Beyond Meat's plant-based offerings to their menus. To date, those companies include McDonald's (also a Canadian pilot), KFC, Subway, Carl's Jr., Hardee's and more. The lab-grown, plant-based meat trend is a product of science and tech, but it's also driven by a growing awareness of the environmental impacts of meat production. Earlier this year, Starbucks said it was committed to a "resource-positive future," which includes expanding plant-based options and creating a more environmentally friendly menu. The upcoming egg, cheddar and Beyond Meat sausage breakfast sandwich is the first major step in that direction.

Vice President Mike Pence will be put in charge of the U.S. response to the deadly coronavirus outbreak, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday in an address from the White House. CNBC reports: Trump, in a rare appearance in the White House briefing room, maintained that the risk to the U.S. from the virus "remains very low," amid global fears that a pandemic could be imminent. But the U.S. is ready for "anything," Trump said, including an outbreak "of larger proportions." In that spirit, Trump said he would be putting Pence, who has "a certain talent for this," in charge of the response. The president cited his veep's experience with health care policy during his time as governor of Indiana.

Around noon Wednesday, the CDC had confirmed 60 coronavirus cases in the U.S., a majority of which came from passengers repatriated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was quarantined off the coast of Japan. The Trump administration has taken numerous steps in response to the virus, such as declaring a public health emergency and imposing travel restrictions and mandatory quarantines. And White House officials, along with Trump himself, have worked to ease fears of a pandemic that have rattled governments and investors around the world.

The ocean's most mammoth, docile beasts manage to find their way around the oceans with relative ease. And that's especially true for the gray whale, a creature that makes the biggest migration of any mammal, traveling over 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) across the planet to feed and breed. New research suggests gray whales may navigate with a kind of seventh sense that allows them to detect variations in the Earth's magnetic field -- and this sense can be adversely affected by the sun. From a report: Gray whales are about as long as a school bus and six times heavier than an African elephant. They communicate using low-frequency sounds and navigate the oceans without the help of GPS. In a study published in the journal Current Biology on Monday, researchers examined 186 strandings of gray whales reported between 1985 and 2018. To try to tighten up the data set and remove some variables, the team looked at strandings of whales that were stranded alive with "no signs of injury, illness, emaciation or human interaction." The strandings were then correlated with various measures of solar activity: how many sunspots were present, changes in the Earth's magnetic field and solar radio flux, which is determined by radio frequency noise and has shown to correlate well with sunspot numbers and be affected by solar storms.

Top U.S. public health officials said Tuesday that Americans should prepare for the spread of the coronavirus in communities across the country. From a report: "It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness," Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a media briefing Tuesday. Measures to contain the virus in the U.S. so far have involved restricting travel to and from China -- the center of the outbreak -- and isolating identified cases. But Messonnier said evidence that the virus is spreading to countries outside the region, such as Iran and Italy, has raised the CDC's "level of concern and expectation that we'll see spread" in the U.S.

Scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel discovered that a salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola doesn't have a mitochondrial genome -- the first multicellular organism known to have this absence. That means it doesn't breathe; in fact, it lives its life completely free of oxygen dependency. ScienceAlert reports: It's a cnidarian, belonging to the same phylum as corals, jellyfish and anemones. Although the cysts it creates in the fish's flesh are unsightly, the parasites are not harmful, and will live with the salmon for its entire life cycle. Tucked away inside its host, the tiny cnidarian can survive quite hypoxic conditions. But exactly how it does so is difficult to know without looking at the creature's DNA -- so that's what the researchers did.

They used deep sequencing and fluorescence microscopy to conduct a close study of H. salminicola, and found that it has lost its mitochondrial genome. In addition, it's also lost the capacity for aerobic respiration, and almost all of the nuclear genes involved in transcribing and replicating mitochondria. Like the single-celled organisms, it had evolved mitochondria-related organelles, but these are unusual too -- they have folds in the inner membrane not usually seen. The same sequencing and microscopic methods in a closely related cnidarian fish parasite, Myxobolus squamalis, was used as a control, and clearly showed a mitochondrial genome. These results show that here, at last, is a multicellular organism that doesn't need oxygen to survive. Exactly how it survives is still something of a mystery. It could be leeching adenosine triphosphate from its host, but that's yet to be determined. But the loss is pretty consistent with an overall trend in these creatures - one of genetic simplification. Over many, many years, they have basically devolved from a free-living jellyfish ancestor into the much more simple parasite we see today. The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

Last month, 109 people gathered in a Singapore hotel for an international sales conference held by a U.K.-based company that makes products to analyze gas. When the attendees flew home, some unwittingly took the coronavirus with them [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: The virus had a 10-day head start on health authorities who, after belatedly learning a 41-year-old Malaysian participant was infected, began a desperate effort to track the infection through countries including South Korea, England and France. Health investigators have found at least 20 people in six Asian and European countries who were sickened, some who attended the conference and others who came in contact with participants. A globalized economy, one that's far more integrated than in the early 2000s when the SARS virus broke out, is complicating the task of responding to epidemics.

After this one conference alone, 94 participants left Singapore, authorities determined. Some joined Lunar New Year dinners. Others went on vacation, one to an Alpine ski town. They had eaten, taken car rides and shared a roof with others who then boarded more planes to places the virus hadn't yet reached. Health officials used international communications channels to share names of the potentially infected and relied on self-reporting by sickened conference-goers, creating "activity maps" that detailed their movement. They checked flight manifests and called passengers. French authorities closed down schools in sparsely populated towns. U.K. public-health officials isolated health-care workers who got the illness and searched for patients with whom they came in contact.