Science Friday - Experimental HIV Vaccines, Lithium Mining In Oregon, Controlling The Tawny Crazy Ant. April 1, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

Why Another Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapsed On March 15, the Conger ice shelf, a piece of ice half the size of Rome, collapsed in eastern Antarctica. It’s the first time that side of the continent experienced a major loss of ice in the 40-year history of satellite observations. Previous collapses of shelves have until now occurred in western Antarctica. Meanwhile, researchers are reporting temperatures more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average, while parts of the Arctic are beating averages by 50 degrees. Scientific American’s Sophie Bushwick explains why warming at the poles is both more likely than other parts of the globe, and is also exacerbating the likelihood of collapses like this. Plus, new insights into strange radio circles in space, the Hubble telescope sees the most distant star yet, and a look at the statistical likelihood of basketball “hot hands.” And an April Fool’s Day quiz on some new inventions that may or may not be real.   Scientists Are Working On HIV Vaccines Based On COVID Vaccine Tech Several early Phase 1 human trials of vaccines using mRNA technology are now under way. The approach—which uses mRNA to induce the body to manufacture specific parts of a viral structure that then trains the immune system—was famously successful in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the basis for both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. Now, researchers are wondering if the mRNA approach might be a solution to diseases like HIV, which have thwarted vaccine researchers for years. The NIH has supported three trials, other trials from IAVI and Moderna are also under way in Phase 1. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, joins Ira to talk about the challenges of developing vaccines against HIV, the path through the clinical trials process, and why researchers are very cautiously optimistic about the new vaccine trials. They also discuss the state of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for continued vigilance and funding.   An Oregon Lithium Deposit Could Help Power Clean Energy Tech President Joe Biden and U.S. lawmakers are ramping up their efforts to mine, manufacture and process more battery materials at home — and that’s drawn praise from the company exploring a large lithium deposit in southeast Oregon. Jindalee Resources Limited, the Australian company with lithium claims at a Bureau of Land Management site in Oregon’s Malheur County, says the growing push for U.S. critical minerals production is a positive sign. “You’ve seen bipartisan support for the development of critical minerals projects growing,” said Lindsay Dudfield, Jindalee’s executive director. “Jindalee is advancing a critical minerals project, and so we’re very encouraged by these developments.” The Intercept reported Thursday that Biden is preparing to invoke the Defense Production Act to expedite production of batteries for electric vehicles, consumer electronics and renewable energy storage. The Defense Production Act was recently used to increase supply and hasten delivery of COVID-19 vaccines. Lawmakers in recent weeks have urged the president to use his authority under the law to do the same for batteries. “The time is now to grow, support, and encourage investment in the domestic production of graphite, manganese, cobalt, lithium, nickel, and other critical minerals to ensure we support our national security, and to fulfill our need for lithium-ion batteries — both for consumers and for the Department of Defense,” wrote Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; Joe Manchin,D-W.Va.; Jim Risch, R-Idaho; and Bill Cassidy, R-La., in a letter to the president last week. The Biden administration published a report last June that found the American battery supply chain to be extremely vulnerable as demand for batteries increases. For decades, the U.S. has relied on foreign imports of minerals needed to make those batteries, especially lithium. While the U.S. has large lithium reserves, it only produces about 1% of the world’s supply. Demand for lithium and other materials is expected to skyrocket as the U.S. seeks to transition away from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. The Biden administration’s report says lithium could be a good candidate for new domestic mining and extraction, which would reduce American dependence on foreign sources like Russia and China. But as the rush for critical minerals like lithium speeds up in the U.S., environmental groups, Native American tribes and others have urged caution, especially when it comes to new mining. The extractive industry remains enormously destructive to frontline communities as well as land, water and wildlife. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   An Unusual Fungus May Control Invasive Tawny Crazy Ants The Tawny crazy ant (sometimes called the Rasberry crazy ant) is an invasive species originally found in South America. Over the past few decades, it has found a home in U.S. Gulf states and parts of Texas. The ant, named “crazy” for its erratic movements, can outcompete native ant species when it takes hold, and can overwhelm small animals with sheer numbers. In 2013, Science Friday spoke with Edward LeBrun, a research scientist at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory of UT Austin, about the ant and its ability to outcompete fire ants in the southern U.S. Now, LeBrun returns to share news of a possible biological control for the ants, a form of fungus that can cause infected nests to collapse over a period of years. It’s a good news, bad news situation—while most insecticides and baits don’t work to control the ants, the fungus can produce local extinction. However, it takes years to work, and currently requires transferring hundreds of infected ants into a nest—not exactly something you can pick up off the shelf at the local hardware store.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Later in the hour, we'll talk about lithium deposits in the state of Oregon and catch up with Dr. Anthony Fauci about new HIV vaccine tests. But first, with all the news last weekend, you may have missed this milestone. An ice shelf in East Antarctica called the Conger has collapsed within days of new record-setting warm temperatures, I mean 70 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Here with more about that and other science stories of the week is so far. Bushwick, Technology Editor for Scientific American. Welcome back, Sophie. Thank you. How big is this ice shelf?

So this ice shelf is about the size of a large city, which means it's relatively small as far as ice shelves go. There are other ones off of Antarctica that are more like the size of a state in the U.S. But what's interesting about this is that this is an ice shelf on the east area of Antarctica and not the West. So previously, ice shelves, it's a part of the natural cycle for an ice shelf to have pieces break off and to form icebergs, which has happened to this ice shelf before. But the full collapse of an ice shelf is more of an issue. And that's what's happened here in East Antarctica for the first time in a while. Why is this bad when these collapses happen? An ice shelf is sort of like a barrier that holds in the land ice in Antarctica. So the ice that's above ground in Antarctica does. flow directly into the ocean because the ice shelf is there blocking it. And so when the ice shelf breaks off, that leaves the makes it more likely that land ice will also flow into the ocean

and this can contribute to sea level rise. And as you said, this shelf was in a part of Antarctica where we've never observed a collapse before, right? East Antarctica. Do we know why it happened now? It's very difficult to say definitively this is because of global warming, but Antarctica is getting a lot hotter than it used to be. Like you mentioned, it's been having right now some record-breaking temperatures for this time of year. And it seems that although this had already, this type of warming had already started affecting ice shelves in West Antarctica, it's also now affecting East Antarctica, which is potentially a big issue if we're looking forward to future ice shelf collapses. And I imagine scientists are worried that more collapses may start to happen in this same region.

Absolutely. The more ice shelves collapse, The more ice that's currently held out of the ocean above ground is going to be flowing into the ocean. And the problem is that this is just going to keep contributing to higher sea levels. Okay. So our climate crisis is depressing. Let's move off Earth for a minute. Let's go into space. All right. Let's go into space. And you have an update on a strange phenomenon called ORC. What is an ORC? in ORC is an odd radio circle and it's essentially a big ring of radio waves and when radio telescopes have spotted these but the kind of telescopes that look for x-rays and visible light have not been able to see them. So it's this mystery. Why is there this big ring of radio waves that doesn't seem to have a signature in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and what causes them? And so previous obviously radio telescopes have only found five of these objects, and now the Mirkat telescope in South Africa has imaged one of these ORCs in much more detail. And so they've learned

things like, for instance, this seems, this big circle seems to be about a million light years across. That's 10 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy. And they've also found that there is so that's the size of the big outer circle, but the ORCs seem to also have smaller circles within them. sort of like a nested soap bubbles. Wow. Do we know what could have caused these ORCs? That seem really weird. It's hard to say.

A lot of them have galaxies at their center. So some researchers think there could be something that had happened inside that galaxy. And then the waves of it had spread out to form the ORC. It could be something like a big collision, like maybe two supermassive black holes collided. And then the shock waves from that spread out. and created it. There's other theories as well, but one of the reasons that they wanted to take

this image and to look more closely at an ORC is so they can figure this out. Cool. You have another story about the Hubble telescope seeing a very far off star. How far off are we talking about? So when you're looking off into space with a telescope, you're also looking back in time. And so this star is so far off that they think it existed within, the first billion years after the Big Bang. So that's in the first, that's when the universe was about 7% of its current age. It's really far back. And before then, the furthest star back in time that Hubble had seen was only from the first four billion years after the Big Bang. So this one is much further back and much more distant. So we're looking back in time. Right. Because it takes light,

even though light is traveling at the speed of light, if it's far enough away, it will still take a long time to reach us. And that's what's happened in the case of these very distant stars. So we're getting to see what the early universe might have looked like or parts of it. That's right. So previously, Hubble has seen objects further back, but they haven't been individual stars. So being able to see this star and a star from so early in the universe, researchers are really excited to say, okay, what is this star made of? What is it like? What were stars like so early in the universe, so close to the Big Bang, as opposed to what they're like now?

All right. Let's move on to March Madness for all you basketball fans. you brought us a story about basketball statistics. Tell us about that. That's right. So researchers decided to look into the phenomenon of hot hands. So when a player is hot hands, you say they're on a streak of making a lot of baskets in a row. But the question is, is this just an issue of interpretation or is there actually a statistically significant streak going on? So for an example, I can take a penny and flip the coin a bunch of times. And it's possible that I'll get a bunch of tails in a row.

But once I flip it enough times, you'll see that in total I still average out to getting tails about half the time and heads about half the time. So the streak that was in the middle was within the bounds of random chance. So that's the question these researchers wanted to answer. Is this type of streak an issue of random chance that we humans are seeing a pattern in? or is it really happening? And they found that this is a real phenomenon, although it is quite rare. Wow.

I mean, we're talking basketball here, but sports people, people who play the sports, they believe in streaks, right? And you hear people talking about, give the ball to this guy, he's got a hot hand, or, you know, I'm in a batting streak. That player is really hot. I guess it's true. It is. It is.

So now the players can point to science and say, look, there is, there is, There is mathematics behind this phenomenon. Give me the ball. I guess that was a slam duck for the researchers. Trying. Sorry. Sorry. Finally, I heard there is a rumor.

There's a rumor going around that today might be, what, April 1st, April Fool's Day, and I'm about to get pranked. Is that? Happy April Fool's Day, Ira. Tell me about this rumor. So we've prepared three stories. for you about different products that are made that have been inspired by the animal kingdom. The problem is two of these products don't exist. Only one of them is real. And you're going to have

to guess which one it is. Oh, boy. Okay. Let's have product number one. All right. So the inspiration for this one is the catfish. So catfish have an incredible sense of taste. They've got 175,000 taste buds. In comparison, humans have 8 to 10,000. So catfish, can detect a lot of things, and now they are, their densely packed taste buds have inspired in electronic tongue that can act as a sensor and pick up environmental contaminants. Electronic tongue, a catfish-inspired electronic tongue. Is that real? Okay, number two. Okay, number two, we're going to stay underwater and look at the squid. So squid's skin famously can change color so the squid can camouflage itself. And it does this by shifting the structure

of the skin. And now researchers have used this shifting structure as their inspiration for an insulating material, which can shift its structure to keep hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold. So it changes how it dissipates heat. So this one is a squid skin inspired, like a coozy. I can see a squid liking one of those. Does a squid inspire insulating material for my beer or my coffee? Okay. Okay. I'm thinking about it. Number three. Okay. And so then our last one is a lot cuddlier. We're going to look at the koala, which carries its young inside a pouch. So this has been the inspiration for researchers who are making search and rescue robots, and they wanted these robots to be able to recharge. So they've got a mobile charging system where the robots actually, they don't crawl into a pouch,

but they do go into a box to recharge. The idea is that this platform can sort of go with the search and rescue robots, they can go off and explore and then return to it. Wow. A koala-inspired mobile charging dock. That's right. And I have to guess which one of these is the real story. Just one of these is real.

All right. Wait, wait, don't tell me. I'll come up with the answer, I think. Hmm. Catfish-inspired electronic tongue could be. A squid-skin-inspired coozy? That's possible. a koala inspired charging dock for robots.

Because I love, I love squid and all of our cephalopods for cephalopod week, I'm going to go with squid-skid-inspired coozy. That's what I did it. That is correct. Oh, come on, did I really? You really did. This is actually very cool. So basically, yeah, in squid-skin, there are these pants.

pigmented cells called chromatophores that kind of cluster together in islands that can be bigger or smaller. And the idea of this insulating material is they've got these little, similarly, they've got metal that can form larger or smaller structures depending on whether this material is compressed or stretched. And so that gives the researchers greater control over how much heat is dissipating. Well, they, Seths come through again for us. Thank you, Sophie. You're welcome. Have a good April Fool's Day. You too.

Don't get fooled. Sophie Bushwick Technology Editor for Scientific American. A quick note that next week will be live, yes, live back in the studio and taking your phone calls. And we're going to be talking about spring gardening. Do you have spring gardening questions? I know you do. We'll be taking them live next week. And share them on our SciFri Vox Pop app also.

You can help shape our conversation that way. That's the SciFri Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Coming up after the break, Dr. Anthony Fauci on vaccines for HIV and the latest on the COVID-19 pandemic. When it comes to the percentage of the population, that's both fully vaccinated as well as boosted. We've really got to do much better. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato.

One of the most striking parts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the rapid development and deployment of highly affected vaccines, especially those based on MRNA, a technology that hadn't been widely used in vaccines before. Now, researchers are working to see what other illnesses that MRNA technology might be used for, and recently several trials began, early phase one human trials, for an MRNA-based vaccine for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Joining me now is Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious. diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and NIH-supported trial of three different HIV vaccines using mRNA technology recently got underway. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you, R. It's good to be

back with you. Thank you. Now, researchers have been trying for an HIV vaccine for so long. I'm sure you know that. What makes you think that this approach will be more successful? Well, it almost certainly is related to the spectacular success that we've seen with the utilization of the MRNA platform and its great deal of flexibility of expression in the arena of COVID-19. We went from the sequence of the SARS-CoB2 virus, and within 11 months from the publication publicly of that sequence, we have vaccine going into the arms of individuals that has already been proven to be safe and effective. So because of that, investigators are all now putting a considerable effort to determine if whatever advantage one might get, the flexibility, the ability

to express different antigens and different confirmations, if we can somehow transfer that to the very problematic field of HIV vaccine, that certainly would be worth trying. And that's exactly what we're seeing in the trials that NIAID is funding in a phase one level, to look at different confirmations of HIV envelope antigens to be expressed in an MRNA platform with the hope that we get similar results. So it's an exciting field. It's really been triggered and stimulated with a considerable amount of enthusiasm and based on the success with SARS-CoV-2. Well, let's talk a bit about that. How much does what we learned with SARS-CoV-2 apply to these new vaccines, or is it a completely separate product?

Well, it's a separate product in that the immunogen is different. What's the similarity are, is the platform that's used. If one thinks in terms of the two major components of a vaccine, it's the vaccine platform, and that could be MRNA, that could be viral-like particle, that could be nanoparticle, that could be vector expressed like adeno. And then the other component is the actual immunogen design. So we have the platform itself, but then the immunogen design of SARS-CoV-2, namely the stabilized pre-fusion spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, combined with the flexibility of the MRNA platform led to the success of that. That's the same sort of approach that's going to be applied to the HIV translation of that concept,

where you'll have an MRNA, and you'll have various confirmations of envelope and other proteins of HIV to be used in the MRNA. So hopefully what we've learned with SARS-CoB2, there's a lot of enthusiasm and some cautious optimism that that might push the envelope a bit and get us a step closer to an HIV vaccine. Yeah, because last time we talked about the difficulties of creating an HIV vaccine, if I recall it correctly, you said that one of the problems is that the virus mutates too much to keep up with it. It's sort of like whack-a-mole. If that is correct, how does this technique keep up with the change in the virus? The problem with an HIV vaccine is in many respects related to the fact that the body, at least the way the immunogen is presented to the body does not do very well in making broadly neutralizing antibodies, which is essentially the sine qua non of what you would need to get a safe and effective HIV vaccine. We've been able to induce with a variety of products

binding antibodies, antibodies that might be neutralizing against just the autologous strain, but thus far, despite years of trying, we've been unsuccessful to induce a sustained, broadly neutralizing antibody response that given the ability of this virus to change so much, you want something to have as broadly neutralizing against any iteration of the particular virus. That's really been the stumbling block. of getting an HIV vaccine. So it's hoped that with this new manner of presenting the immunogen to the body with the MRNA technology, that that might be the extra added step that would get us a little bit closer to a successful HIV vaccine. It's a complicated issue, but we believe

it's one way to get closer to that possibility. Yeah, you seem to be giving us some caution flags here, not to expect too much. Would I be reading that correctly? No, you're actually reading it correctly, Ira, because HIV has been such a problematic situation to develop broadly neutralizing antibodies, to get the body to coax the immune system along, to make antibodies that are truly broadly neutralizing. I mean, any antigen will induce an antibody. I mean, that goes without saying. The trick, HIV, given the nature of that virus, if you really want protection, it's got to be a broadly neutralizing anybody, and we've not been able to do that.

So when you hear a degree of caution in my explanation, it's because I am aware of really how difficult it has been through multiple attempts to get the engagement of the B-cell repertoire to come up with a broadly neutralizing anybody. But again, like I said, that combination of a new platform that's shown success with SARS-CoB-2 together with some clever immunogen designs with the right structural confirmation might get us to that goalpost. I hope so. Okay, so we're in phase one. Phase one means what? We're just trying to see that it doesn't hurt people? Well, one, it's safe and does it induce the kind of immune response that you're hoping for? It has nothing to do with efficacy because you don't know until you do a trial that's large

enough to determine efficacy. So when you're dealing with a phase one, it's just as you say, Ira, A, is it safe? Are there any idiosyncratic or difficult reactions? Are there a lot of reactogenicity? Are there any adverse events? And two, you'll get the opportunity to measure the antibodies that are induced in the phase one response. And you could get an inkling of whether or not they do have a degree of broad reactivity to them. You don't necessarily in that trial show that it works. But you can get a hint if you're dealing with the induction of what looks like broadly neutralizing antibodies or at least a step towards broadly neutralizing antibodies.

Okay, so then how long do you think it will take before we know, whether we move on to phase two or not? Well, phase ones really don't take very long. They're really measured in months, if you want to call it that, because usually any adverse events or reactagenicity you see pretty quickly, and it usually takes when you give it, you know, a period of at least several weeks to a more than that months or so to determine the level of the immune response. Once you get that, if you get favorable data,

then you start thinking of expanding the numbers of people in the trial to get a little bit more information, not only about the safety, not only about the immunogenicity, but then you can start talking in terms of the possibility of some early inklings of efficacy. And then, of course, hopefully you'd move on to phase three, which is actually testing out. Exactly, a much, much larger trial to really nail down efficacy. Given the speed of which COVID was, as you say, the short months-long period, could we expect to see a months-long instead of a years-long period of the test of the HIV vaccine? Probably not. The reason we were able to do it so quickly with SARS-CoV-2 is that we were testing it in tens of thousands of people in the middle of

an explosive outbreak. And when you have an explosive outbreak, you're going to get a lot of endpoints very quickly. That's not necessarily the case, because although HIV in certain subpopulations has a high degree of incidence, it isn't anything like what we saw in the explosive outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, which was spread by the respiratory and really had no other way of blocking it. Whereas with HIV, what you've got to do, if you want to do an ethical clinical trial, you've got to instruct people in the use of condoms, some of them even want to be using, and it's appropriate to use pre-exposure prophylaxis. So to get endpoints in a HIV vaccine trial, when you have in many respects the ethical obligation to let people know and make available to them

what they can do to avoid infection, that is very difficult and very different, as it were, from an explosive respiratory illness in which you don't really have much protection except wearing a mask. So you're saying you have to be very particular in how you choose the people to go into the trials? Right. You really want to do it in a group that's relatively high risk, because if you do it in a very low risk, by the time you get enough end point.

of infections or protection from infections. It could be a matter of years and years. And that's the reason why I answered your question that I don't think it's nearly going to be as quickly as the result that we got from the SARS-CoV-2, which was really measured in a matter of months. Do you think you're going to have trouble finding enough people for the trials? That's the reason, Ira, why many of the vaccine trials that have been conducted have been conducted in other countries because in the United States, the incidents, even in at-risk populations, is still relatively speaking, rather low. So if you really want to get an answer, particularly if you want to get an answer in a reasonable period of time, you've got to go to a place

where the risk and incidence is relatively high. I'm Ira Plato, and this is Science Friday. from WNYC Studios. I can't let you go in the last minute or two that we have without talking about COVID for a moment because according to the CDC reports about a third of Americans have not gotten their initial round of shots and more than 70 percent have not received boosters. Do you find that incredible? That's very, very unfortunate in my mind, Ara. we have a highly effective and safe vaccine, and we have only about 65 to 67% of the total population is fully vaccinated.

Of those who are vaccinated, about 50% of them have received their boost. That's really a very low number. We've got to do much better than that, particularly given the data, which are extremely convincing, of the difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated and vaccinated with a boost compared to unvaccinated. When you look at the incidents of hospitalization, severe disease, and deaths, as a country, a developed rich country,

we are not doing nearly as well as so many other countries, including several in Europe and the UK, when it comes to the percentage of the population that's both fully vaccinated as well as boosted. We've really got to do much better. The reasons for that, Ira, are very complicated. It has a lot to do with the extraordinary degree of divisiveness that we have in this country where vaccination has become,

in some respects, politicized, and there's been a lot of pushback and a lot of anti-vaccine and sentiment in the country. Really quite unfortunate when you're dealing with, dealing with an outbreak that has already killed close to one million Americans in two years and three months. And Congress seems to be reluctant about giving more money of President Biden requested billions of dollars for tests and treatments.

And it's sort of stalled in Congress right now. Yeah, it is. And again, that's another really unfortunate situation. We were thinking we were going to get a rather large amount. I mean, well over 30 billion, and then it went down to 22, and then 15 billion went into the omnibus, and then it was yanked out. So unless we get some money pretty quickly, Ira, we're not going to be able to finish some of the trials that we started and certainly not initiate anything new unless we get rescued here with some resources that can have us continue our efforts. It almost seems like we've gone back to a pre-COVID mentality. Well, I don't know if you want to call it that, but it certainly is something that's not good.

That's for sure. Yeah. And finally, you know, almost lost in the talk about COVID survivability, we've talked about them in depth of the long haulers. People who are infected come down with long-term illnesses or disabilities. And I got the impression that people think that, well, I've gotten COVID. I've survived it. I'm free and clear, but there could be a lot of cases of long haulers that don't show up yet. Yeah, that's the truth, Ira. That's one of the reasons why we are concerned not only about hospitalizations and deaths, but also, you know, it's a range. It's anywhere from five to 30 percent or so

of individuals who, to a greater or lesser degree have the lingering of signs and symptoms, some of which are really unexplainable by any identifiable pathogenic process that can go on for weeks to months. Some of them are mild to moderate, but some of them can be incapacitating. And we have a number of examples. I mean, countless examples of people whose way of life has been really impeded dramatically, not by the COVID that they've survived, but by the long COVID and the lingering on of a lot of unexplained. symptomatology. Well, Dr. Fauci, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today, and good luck to you. Thank you, Iro. Always good to be with you. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of

Allergy and Infectious Diseases, based in Bethesda, Maryland. We have to take a break, but when we come back, I'll look at a large lithium deposit in Oregon and how changing geopolitics could make it a hot local commodity. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Southeast Oregon is home to a large lithium deposit.

Lithium is the lightest metal on the periodic table, since it's highly reactive. It's used in batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Interest in Oregon's lithium deposit is likely to grow. This week, President Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up the mineral supply chain at home. This is an effort to stop relying on countries like Russia and China for vital green energy minerals. How could this play out in Oregon? Joining me today to help us break it down is Bradley Parks, Environment Reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting, based in Bend, Oregon. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hello, Ira. Thanks for having me. Quite welcome. So can you give us an idea of just how big, this lithium deposit is? Sure. So it's kind of complicated, but the initial estimates from the company put it at around 1.4 billion tons of material. That's the estimated mineral resource is what they call it. And that would create about 10.1 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent.

Like I said, it's kind of complicated how much lithium that actually is, but those are the numbers that we have. But that translates to a lot of batteries, right? Right, exactly. And tell us about the ecosystem where this deposit sits. Sure. So this is part of what's known as the sagebrush sea. It's a big swath of land that runs across the American West,

and it's home to creatures like sage grouse, golden eagles, the haunt and cutthroat trout are important in the waterways there, pronghorn, some of the fastest land mammals in North America. And that ecosystem has declined by as much as half in the past century. So it's kind of a vital resource. And this particular location is part of what's known as a sagebrush focal area. So it's a label that the federal government used to designate the best of the best sagebrush habitat left. So I would imagine in this extraction project, there's been pushback against mining lithium at this site. Right. So the biggest threats to,

you know, the sagebrush sea are habitat fragmentation. And that's what gradually whittled it away over time. And people are still worried about that now. Now, I understand that an Australian company has claims to the lithium on this land. So what kind of work is being done there now? Right. So they're in the exploration phase. So basically looking to see exactly how much lithium is out there. That estimate is exactly what it sounds like. It's just an estimate. And so what they're doing is they're in the midst of a multi-year drilling campaign to sort of see exactly how much is out there. And by increasing confidence in their estimate, they're able to attract investors and, you know, make money for themselves. And so that process

takes many, many years. There are many rounds of permitting and regulatory review that are involved. And so I spoke with the executive director of Gindalee Resources, the Australian company, Lindsay Dudfield, and he said that there are still years between now and potentially mining this project. There's a lot of work to be done, and we may never get to the position where we are able to mine the project. So as you say, this is not going to be happening anytime soon, any sense of a ballpark timeline. Right. So with all of the drilling that still has to be done for the exploration as well as like pre-feasibility studies on a mine, environmental impact, National Environmental Policy Act Review. They estimate still like five years away from even having

a mining pitch to be reviewed. So still quite a while. But it's also worth noting that political support at the federal level is ramping up. And that's good news for people who are in the critical minerals business. Yeah, because as I mentioned earlier, the Defense Production Act will bolster the manufacturing of items, including electric car batteries. And of course, that would have an impact on the lithium in Oregon, I would expect. Exactly. And not just in Oregon, but in other places that we know that lithium exists in the United States, particularly Nevada, the Carolinas as well, anywhere that has a lithium deposit. If we know it's there, we can only mine lithium where we know it exists. And so those communities are going to be the ones faced with this debate. And I imagine

As you mentioned before, they'll have to be balancing the impact on the environment with the process of mining the ore. Exactly. So there are a number of things to take into consideration. Thea Rio Franco is an associate professor at Providence College and is an expert on lithium extraction and has studied it in Latin America where mining is much bigger industry than in the United States. And she had this to say. We're looking at a very invasive economic sector that is among the most environmentally discharges. in the world. And we should be thinking about what an energy transition would look like that attempted to reduce how much resources needed to come out of the ground with the knowledge that some do, for sure. But can we try to avoid as much new mining as possible? And what would that

look like? So there's this acknowledgement that we do need some lithium to make batteries for electric cars and to store renewable energy sources like wind and solar. But lithium itself, is a non-renewable resource. We only have what we have. And so I guess opponents to this are focused on how can we achieve the same goals of energy storage and powering electric vehicles and consumer electronics like that through things like recycling and focusing our electric electrification on larger sectors like transit. But this is while the political pressure is sort of ramping up with the Defense Production Act, that process is moving pretty fast. But the process of actually exploring and mining deposits like this still takes a long time, like we mentioned

earlier. And so now is the time to have those conversations about whether we want to dig this up and sacrifice the land that sits on top of it. We have to have those conversations while the material is still in the ground. This had to be on the radar screen in the past along, you know, at some time. Do you feel that this has moved to the front burner with all the political and issues that are going on now that made it more urgent? Yeah, there's sort of been a slow buildup to this like rush for critical minerals in the United States. So the U.S. produces around 1% of the global supply of lithium. But there have been a number of factors that have played into getting where we are today. So there's the trade war with China. China is obviously

a big in the refinery and in production of battery materials. And so that trade war sort of primed us for where we are now. There are, you know, announcements by companies like General Motors and other automakers who say we're going all electric. Those are not empty claims and they require a lot of materials, not just lithium, but cobalt and nickel and copper and other things that are used in batteries. That's another element of this. And then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia is a critical minerals powerhouse and Ukraine also has large lithium deposits. So the war in Ukraine has also had its effect on the global supply of critical minerals. What that means for frontline communities is if you have lithium, there's about to be a process playing out to possibly pull that out of the

ground. And like I said before, now is the time to have the conversation while it's still in there. Yeah, good perspective on this, Bradley. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Ira. Bradley Park's Environment Reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting based in Bend, Oregon. For the rest of the hour, an update on the tawny crazy ant. Now, if you're not from the southern part of the U.S., you may not be acquainted with these ants, an introduced species that normally lives in places like Uruguay. But over the past few decades, it's been spreading north and often crowding out native species where it arrives in such numbers

that these ants can overwhelm small animals. But researchers now report that they may have found a natural limiter on the ants. I'm talking about a fungus. Joining me now to talk about the work published this week and the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is Dr. Edward LeBron. He's a research scientist at the Breckenridge Field Laboratory, University of Texas at Austin. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. It's good to be back. Describe for us what these ants do. Why are they called crazy ants?

It's a name that's applied to this genus and some related genera that they tend to forage in a very erratic way, so they turn a lot. So it looks like they're crazy. And there's something unusual. They're in super colonies. Explain that. Yeah. It's actually a trait shared by a lot of sort of the globally significant invasive species. And what it means is that ants from different nests within a population cooperate as colony amates.

and even if that population is very large, kilometers in diameter, they still all cooperate as colony mates. And in fact, all of the infestations in the southeastern United States, to the best of our knowledge at this point, are actually extensions of the same super colony. Wow. Are they all related then? Yes. Most likely this is because they are all descended from the same colony that was originally introduced. Now, way back about nine years ago, I recall we talked to you about the ants spreading north and displacing. the native fire ants. Have they taken over entirely now? No, the females can't fly, so they don't

spread super rapidly across the landscape. People accidentally introduce them into a location, and then they spread by nest fission. And so what you end up with at the landscape scale are these spots, sort of like the southeastern United States has chicken pox with dots all over it. But those dots haven't coalesced. So the majority of the southeast is still not invaded by these ants. You mentioned nest fission, the dividing of the nests. Is that how they spread? Yeah, locally, that's how they spread. So it's how they reproduce. A nest gets large. It divides into two. Some queens go with one with workers and some queens remain. And that process goes on, which leads to sort of this bacterial plaque-like form of spread. It can be up to about 100 meters a year, the edge of the population as it moves.

But the way they really get around is people picking up a potted plant that has them in them and moving it. Or if they have RVs, the ants move into the RVs and they go visit their favorite state park and the ants get off. So that's the way that you get long distance dispersal with this ant. All right. Let's get now to the meat of this, or actually the fungus of this, if I might say. You have found that there's a natural fungus that seems to control them. Tell us about that. Yeah.

So it's actually an organism called a microsporidian. And they reproduce inside the cells of their hosts, which are mostly insects. They produce a spore like fungus. And the spore, when it's ingested by the host and detects the correct environmental signals, it actually fires off what's called a polar tube, which is this harpoon-like structure that's inside the spore, punctures the cell wall of the host, and they inject the entire contents of the spore cell into the host, take over and start replicating. It sounds like I'm watching a movie. Wow, that's kind of crazy.

Yeah, they're really remarkable. And they're actually not well known or understood, honestly. They're mostly pathogens of insects and also some fish and crustaceans. And they're very diverse, but we've sort of only found the tip of the iceberg of the diversity. This Microsopridian, for instance, we discovered it in 2013, 2014. And when we published it, us and collaborators at the USDA, turns out to be both a new genus and a new species. Am I Refleado, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Okay, so tell us what happens to the ants when they get infected. When they get infected, the spores actually will proliferate in fat bodies and form what's called sporoly cystic sacks, which means that in a highly infected individual, you can often see a lot of fat tissue in the abdomen of the ant. their shed when the ants defecate the spores are. Eventually, they overwhelm the ant, the ant dies, and then the spores are released into the environment when the ant decomposes.

And why doesn't this fungus affect the fire ants? Well, like a lot of pathogens, it's very species-specific. And there's a lot we don't know about this fungus. We don't actually know where it's from. We don't know if its host was originally tawny crazy ants. But what we do know is that we've tested a bunch of, Ants, Native ants, in areas where they're interacting with infected tiny crazy ants or in areas where there has been a tiny crazy ant population that has collapsed because of this disease,

and none of these ants in nature have the disease. So it seems to be, at least within this context of North America, very specific to tiny crazy ants. So how long does it take to get rid of the whole colony, for the colony to collapse once it's infected? Yeah, so we began back in 2000. 2009 looking at these ants and tracking their densities, and then once we discovered this pathogen, we were able to go back in time and look at their infection levels and then continue that process in other populations. And what we found is that infected populations would decline and decline to the point of local extinction, which is a very rare thing in host pathogen interactions over the period of four to seven years. Wow. That's pretty fast, isn't it? Yeah, it certainly is

fast for a population to, these incredibly dense populations to just entirely disappear. I think if you're a homeowner, you wouldn't find it very fast. Well, that's my next question. If I'm a homeowner, could I go to one of the big box stores and buy the fungus and throw it on my lawn? No. At this point, the only way that we can successfully introduce the fungus into an uninfected population is to take advantage of that trait, that supercloniality that I was talking about and the fact that ants aren't aggressive to ants from distant locations and collect infected ants and bring them and then introduce them into uninfected nests. And the uninfected ants actually

have a lot of behaviors they use to avoid acquiring the infection. So even that process is not 100%. You have to do quite a few introductions and get lucky to some degree. Generally, it's feasible to do it, but it's quite labor intensive. And where do you imagine this being used mostly? if we're not putting it in our homes? Where we are doing it now and where it seems like it's most appropriate are areas of high conservation value. State parks, for instance, areas where people go to enjoy nature, but also areas that have endangered species or rare species. We're doing in environments where karst environments, cave environments, where there's endangered cave

invertebrates in areas where endangered birds are nesting. Interesting. I'm just fascinated by the specificity of the fungus attacking this. kind of ant and not the other kinds of ants. Yeah, it is fascinating. And it's the basis for biological control generally. I mean, we use biological control for that reason, because pathogens tend to be very specific, and parasites and parasitoids tend to be very specific to their hosts. So if you can get one that's specific and tested and prove that it's specific, then you, there's a good chance that you're not going to do unintended harm. In this case, the disease was already present in North America.

so the potential for unintended harm is pretty low. Crazy stuff, very fascinating stuff, Edward. Thank you for taking them to be with us today. Not at all, Ira. I really appreciate the invitation. You're welcome. Edward LeBron, research scientist at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory,

University of Texas at Austin. And that's about it for this hour. Here's Kyle Marion the Turbo with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. Annie Niro is our individual giving manager. John Dan Koski is our director of news and audio. Daniel Peter Schmidt is our digital producer,

and I'm community manager, Kyle Marion Viterrabo. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Kyle. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music, and if you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

You can email us to address SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.