From Michigan State University via phys.org: “Radioactivity in meteorites sheds light on origin of heaviest elements in our solar system”

From Michigan State University

via

phys.org

Artist illustration of the formation of the solar system, capturing the moment where radioactive nuclei got incorporated into solids that would become meteorites. Credit: Bill Saxton / NSF / AUI / NRAO.

A team of international researchers went back to the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago to gain new insights into the cosmic origin of the heaviest elements on the periodic table.

Periodic Table from International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry 2019.

Led by scientists who collaborate as part of the International Research Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (IReNA) and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics—Center for the Evolution of the Elements, the study is published in the latest issue of the journal Science.

Heavy elements we encounter in our everyday life like iron and silver did not exist at the beginning of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. They were created in time through nuclear reactions called nucleosynthesis that combined atoms together. In particular, iodine; gold; platinum; uranium; plutonium; and curium-some of the heaviest elements-were created by a specific type of nucleosynthesis called the rapid neutron capture process or “r” process.

The question of which astronomical events can produce the heaviest elements has been a mystery for decades. Today it is thought that the r process can occur during violent collisions between two neutron stars; between a neutron star and a black hole; or during rare explosions following the death of massive stars. Such highly energetic events occur very rarely in the universe. When they do neutrons are incorporated in the nucleus of atoms and then converted into protons. Since elements in the periodic table are defined by the number of protons in their nucleus the r process builds up heavier nuclei as more neutrons are captured.

Some of the nuclei produced by the r process are radioactive and take millions of years to decay into stable nuclei. Iodine-129 and curium-247 are two of such nuclei that were produced before the formation of the sun. They were incorporated into solids that eventually fell on the earth’s surface as meteorites. Inside these meteorites, the radioactive decay generated an excess of stable nuclei. Today, this excess can be measured in laboratories in order to figure out the amount of iodine-129 and curium-247 that were present in the solar system just before its formation.

Why are these two r-process nuclei are so special? They have a peculiar property in common: they decay at almost exactly the same rate. In other words, the ratio between iodine-129 and curium-247 has not changed since their creation, billions of years ago.

“This is an amazing coincidence, particularly given that these nuclei are two of only five ra-dioactive r-process nuclei that can be measured in meteorites,” says Benoit Co?te? from the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the leader of the study. “With the iodine-129 to curium-247 ratio being frozen in time, like a prehistoric fossil, we can have a direct look into the last wave of heavy element production that built up the composition of the solar system, and everything within it.”

Iodine, with its 53 protons, is more easily created than curium with its 96 protons. This is because it takes more neutron capture reactions to reach curium’s higher number of protons. As a consequence, the iodine-129 to curium-247 ratio highly depends on the amount of neutrons that were available during their creation.

The team calculated the iodine-129 to curium-247 ratios synthesized by collisions between neutron stars and black holes to find the right set of conditions that reproduce the composition of meteorites. They concluded that the amount of neutrons available during the last r-process event before the birth of the solar system could not be too high. Otherwise, too much curium would have been created relative to iodine. This implies that very neutron-rich sources, such as the matter ripped off the surface of a neutron star during a collision, likely did not play an important role.

So what created these r-process nuclei? While the researchers could provide new and insightful information regarding how they were made they could not pin down the nature of the astronomical object that created them. This is because nucleosynthesis models are based on uncertain nuclear properties, and it is still unclear how to link neutron availability to specific astronomical objects such as massive star explosions and colliding neutron stars.

“But the ability of the iodine-129 to curium-247 ratio to peer more directly into the fundamental nature of heavy element nucleosynthesis is an exciting prospect for the future,” said Nicole Vassh from the University of Notre Dame, coauthor of the study.

With this new diagnostic tool, advances in the fidelity of astrophysical simulations and in the understanding of nuclear properties could reveal which astronomical objects created the heaviest elements of the solar system.

“Studies like this are only possible when you bring together a multidisciplinary team, where each collaborator contributes to a distinct piece of the puzzle. The JINA-CEE 2019 Frontiers meeting provided the ideal environment to formalize the collaboration that led to the current result,” Côté said.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. MSU was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

MSU pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, plant biology, supply chain management, and telecommunication. U.S. News & World Report ranks several MSU graduate programs in the nation’s top 10, including industrial and organizational psychology, osteopathic medicine, and veterinary medicine, and identifies its graduate programs in elementary education, secondary education, and nuclear physics as the best in the country. MSU has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

Following the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, MSU is the seventh-largest university in the United States (in terms of enrollment), with over 49,000 students and 2,950 faculty members. There are approximately 532,000 living MSU alumni worldwide.

From Michigan State University via phys.org: “Astronomers discover new candidate redback millisecond pulsar”

From Michigan State University

via

phys.org

January 27, 2021

Optical Digitized Sky Survey image of the field showing the positions and overlapping 95 percent error ellipses from the 1FGL, 2FGL, and 3FGL catalogs corresponding to the gamma-ray source 4FGL J0940.3–7610 (magenta), along with the position of the Swift X-ray source (blue circle). Credit: Swihart et al., 2021.

Astronomers report the finding of a new candidate redback millisecond pulsar (MSP) binary associated with a gamma-ray source known as 4FGL J0940.3–7610. The newly found object is a short-period compact binary exhibiting X-ray emission that consists of a low-mass neutron star and a companion star with a mass most likely over 0.4 solar masses. The discovery is detailed in a paper published January 21 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The most rapidly rotating pulsars, those with rotation periods below 30 milliseconds, are known as millisecond pulsars. Researchers assume that they are formed in binary systems when the initially more massive component turns into a neutron star that is then spun up due to accretion of matter from the secondary star.

A class of extreme binary pulsars with semi-degenerate companion stars is dubbed “spider pulsars.” These objects are further categorized as “black widows” if the companion has extremely low mass (less than 0.1 solar masses), while if the secondary star is heavier they are called “redbacks.”

Now, a team of astronomers led by Samuel J. Swihart of the Michigan State University (MSU) reports the detection of an X-ray and variable optical source that is most likely a new redback MSP binary. The discovery is based on the data obtained with NASA’s Swift spacecraft and Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope in Chile.

NASA Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

NOIRLab NOAO SOAR telescope situated on Cerro Pachón, just to the southeast of Cerro Tololo on the AURA site at an altitude of 2,700 meters (8,775 feet) above sea level.

“We have discovered a new candidate redback millisecond pulsar binary near the center of the error ellipse of the bright unassociated Fermi-LAT gamma-ray source 4FGL J0940.3–7610,” the scientists wrote in the paper.

The results show that the companion is a low-mass star (late-G to early-K type dwarf star) orbiting an invisible primary every 0.27 days. The object showcases ellipsoidal variations and irradiation, consistent with the properties of other known redback MSP binaries.

According to the study, the observed MSP binary has a neutron star with a mass of around 1.2-1.4 solar masses, while the mass of the secondary star turns out to be greater than 0.4 solar masses. The system has an edge-on inclination and is estimated to be some 7,500 light years away from the Earth.

The astronomers noted that the system’s inclination and properties of the companion star could make radio eclipses more likely for this system, what explains its previous non-discovery during radio pulsation observations. This makes 4FGL J0940.3–7610 a strong candidate for a focused search for gamma-ray pulsations.

In concluding remarks, the researchers note that although all the collected data support the redback classification, further studies are necessary in order to confirm this hypothesis.

“Although all the available evidence points towards a redback classification, this needs to be confirmed with additional data. Ultimately this requires a detection of a pulsar in either radio or gamma-ray observations,” the authors of the paper concluded.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. MSU was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

MSU pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, plant biology, supply chain management, and telecommunication. U.S. News & World Report ranks several MSU graduate programs in the nation’s top 10, including industrial and organizational psychology, osteopathic medicine, and veterinary medicine, and identifies its graduate programs in elementary education, secondary education, and nuclear physics as the best in the country. MSU has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

Following the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, MSU is the seventh-largest university in the United States (in terms of enrollment), with over 49,000 students and 2,950 faculty members. There are approximately 532,000 living MSU alumni worldwide.

From Michigan State University: “Supernova surprise creates elemental mystery”

From Michigan State University

Dec. 2, 2020
Matt Davenport

Cassiopeia A is a supernova remnant in the constellation Cassiopeia. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO.

Michigan State University researchers have discovered that one of the most important reactions in the universe can get a huge and unexpected boost inside exploding stars known as supernovae.

In the triple-alpha process, stars fuse three helium nuclei, also called alpha particles together (left) to create a single carbon atom with a surplus of energy, known as a Hoyle state. That Hoyle state can split back into three alpha particles or relax to the ground state of stable carbon by releasing a couple gamma rays (center). Inside supernovae, however, the creation of stable carbon can be enhanced with the help of extra protons (right). Credit: Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.

This finding also challenges ideas behind how some of the Earth’s heavy elements are made. In particular, it upends a theory explaining the planet’s unusually high amounts of some forms, or isotopes, of the elements ruthenium and molybdenum.

“It’s surprising,” said Luke Roberts, an assistant professor at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and the Department of Physics and Astronomy, at MSU. Roberts implemented the computer code that the team used to model the environment inside a supernova. “We certainly spent a lot of time making sure the results were correct.”

The results, published online on Dec. 2 in the journal Nature, show that the innermost regions of supernovae can forge carbon atoms over 10 times faster than previously thought. This carbon creation happens through a reaction known as the triple-alpha process.

“The triple-alpha reaction is, in many ways, the most important reaction. It defines our existence,” said Hendrik Schatz, one of Roberts’s collaborators. Schatz is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and the director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics – Center for the Evolution of the Elements, or JINA-CEE.

Nearly all of the atoms that make up the Earth and everything on it, people included, were forged in the stars. Fans of the late author and scientist Carl Sagan may remember his famous quote, “We’re all made of star stuff.” Perhaps no star stuff is more important to life on Earth than the carbon made in the cosmos by the triple-alpha process.

The process starts with alpha particles, which are the cores of helium atoms, or nuclei. Each alpha particle is made up of two protons and two neutrons.

In the triple-alpha process, stars fuse together three alpha particles, creating a new particle with six protons and six neutrons. This is the universe’s most common form of carbon. There are other isotopes made by other nuclear processes, but those make up just over 1% of Earth’s carbon atoms.

Still, fusing three alpha particles together is usually an inefficient process, Roberts said, unless there’s something helping it along. The Spartan team revealed that the innermost regions of supernovae can have such helpers floating around: excess protons. Thus, a supernova rich in protons can speed up the triple-alpha reaction.

But accelerating the triple-alpha reaction also puts the brakes on the supernova’s ability to make heavier elements on the periodic table, Roberts said. This is important because scientists have long believed that proton-rich supernovae created Earth’s surprising abundance of certain ruthenium and molybdenum isotopes, which contain closer to 100 protons and neutrons.

“You don’t make those isotopes in other places,” Roberts said.

But based on the new study, you probably don’t make them in proton-rich supernovae, either.

“What I find fascinating is that you now have to come up with another way to explain their existence. They should not be here with this abundance,” Schatz said of the isotopes. “It’s not easy to come up with alternatives.”

“It’s kind of a bummer in a way,” said the project’s originator, Sam Austin, an MSU Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former director of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, FRIB’s predecessor. “We thought we knew it, but we don’t know it well enough.”

There are other ideas out there, the researchers added, but none that nuclear scientists find completely satisfying. Also, no existing theory includes this new discovery yet.

“Whatever comes up next, you have to consider the effects of an accelerated triple-alpha reaction. It’s an interesting puzzle,” Schatz said.

Although the team has no immediate solutions to that puzzle, the researchers said it will impact upcoming experiments at FRIB, which was recently designated as a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility.

Furthermore, MSU provides fertile ground for new theories to germinate. It’s home to the nation’s top-ranked graduate program for training the next generation of nuclear physicists. It’s also a core institution of JINA that’s promoting collaborations across nuclear physics and astrophysics like this one, which also included Shilun Jin. Jin worked on the project as an MSU postdoc and has since gone on to join the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

So, although Austin expressed a little disappointment that this result contradicts longstanding notions of element creation, he also knows it will fuel new science and a better understanding of the universe.

“Progress comes when there’s a contradiction,” he said.

“We love progress,” Schatz said. “Even when it’s destroying our favorite theory.”

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and JINA-CEE, which is an NSF Physics Frontiers Center, and DOE’s Advanced Computing program. Additionally, Jin was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship furnished by MSU and the China Scholarship Council.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. MSU was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

MSU pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, plant biology, supply chain management, and telecommunication. U.S. News & World Report ranks several MSU graduate programs in the nation’s top 10, including industrial and organizational psychology, osteopathic medicine, and veterinary medicine, and identifies its graduate programs in elementary education, secondary education, and nuclear physics as the best in the country. MSU has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

Following the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, MSU is the seventh-largest university in the United States (in terms of enrollment), with over 49,000 students and 2,950 faculty members. There are approximately 532,000 living MSU alumni worldwide.

From Michigan State University: “MSU researchers discover ‘missing’ piece of Hawaii’s formation”

From Michigan State University

Nov. 19, 2020
Emilie Lorditch

The journey of Hawaii’s pancake from its creation at the mantle plume to where it slipped under the Pacific plate and sunk deep into the Earth’s mantle.

An oceanic plateau has been observed for the first time in the Earth’s lower mantle, 800 kilometers deep underneath Eastern Siberia, pushing Hawaii’s birthplace back to 100 million years, says a Michigan State University geophysicist.

The discovery came when Songqiao “Shawn” Wei, an Endowed Assistant Professor of Geological Sciences in MSU’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, noticed something unusual in his data using groundbreaking techniques. Wei’s research will be published on Nov. 20 in the journal Science.

Earth’s mantle is mostly solid, but at a mid-ocean ridge it melts creating new oceanic crust between two tectonic plates such as the Pacific Plate. Typically, this new Pacific Ocean crust has a uniform thickness of four miles, Wei said.

As the plates continue to move, a hot plume of solid rocks slowly rises in the mantle melting the tectonic plate to create volcanoes like the Hawaiian Islands. The mantle plume has a mushroom-like shape with a wide head that is thousands of miles across and a thin tail that is only of a few hundred miles across.

Wei said once this mushroom head reaches Earth’s surface in the ocean, it stretches and flattens out, while it melts the overriding tectonic plate to form a pancake-shaped 20-mile-thick oceanic plateau. This process continues as more of the mantle reaches the surface and the overriding plate continues to move. Over time, what remains is a dotted trail of islands.

“Normally, you would see a pancake-shaped oceanic plateau created by the mushroom’s head followed by a dotted chain of islands created by the mushroom’s tail,” Wei said. “The Hawaiian Islands are the end of the tail but where is Hawaii’s pancake head?”

There are still debates on whether every mantle plume creates a “pancake” during its earliest history, and the ultimate destination of these pancake-shaped oceanic plateaus. Trying to find ancient oceanic crust, including old oceanic plateaus, is difficult because the crust might have subducted or slid into or underneath an oceanic trench and disappeared from Earth’s surface.

Although scientists generally believe the oceanic crust is preserved in Earth’s mantle after subduction, it is usually too thin to be observed using conventional technology, such as seismic tomography. Up until now, this is what Wei thought happened to Hawaii’s “pancake” until he detected a surprising signal in the data.

“I spotted an unusually thick chunk of oceanic crust about 500 miles beneath Earth’s surface,” he said. “The thickness of this piece of crust made it distinguishable, but it was still too thin and too deep to be easily found.”

Wei and his team compiled the largest dataset of a specific type of seismograms and conducted big data analysis and numerical simulations on the High-Performance Computing Cluster managed by the MSU Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research. His collaborators include: Peter M. Shearer from Scripps Institute of Oceanography; Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni and Lars Stixrude from the University of California, Los Angeles; and Dongdong Tian from MSU.

The team also combined the strengths of seismic tomography, seismic reflection and mineral physics. Seismic tomography from previously published work creates a 3-D image which revealed a vague image of the ancient Pacific Plate in the mantle. Seismic reflection results —the core observation of this work—helped the researchers find the thick crust at great depths. Mineral physics was used by the team to prove that the detected signal indicates a piece of oceanic plateau.

Plate reconstruction modeling helped the researchers link the newly found oceanic plateau to the Hawaiian “pancake” that was created during the formation of the Hawaii hotspot approximately 100 million years ago.

One hypothesis is that the Hawaii “pancake” broke into two pieces.

One piece was part of the Izanagi Plate which subducted into the Aleutian Trench and disappeared about 70-80 million years ago. The other piece was part of the Pacific Plate and after it entered the Kamchatka Trench 20-30 million years ago, the heavy oceanic crust sunk deep into Earth’s mantle later until Wei and his team spotted it.

This discovery not only provides clues of Hawaii’s early history, but also sheds light on the evolution of other hotspots, seamounts and oceanic plates.The researchers plan to use this new technique combining seismic tomography, seismic reflection and mineral physics to find other “missing pancakes” and to continue looking for evidence of older pieces of Earth’s oceanic crust in the deep Earth.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. MSU was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

MSU pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, plant biology, supply chain management, and telecommunication. U.S. News & World Report ranks several MSU graduate programs in the nation’s top 10, including industrial and organizational psychology, osteopathic medicine, and veterinary medicine, and identifies its graduate programs in elementary education, secondary education, and nuclear physics as the best in the country. MSU has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

Following the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, MSU is the seventh-largest university in the United States (in terms of enrollment), with over 49,000 students and 2,950 faculty members. There are approximately 532,000 living MSU alumni worldwide.

From Michigan State University: “Nature provides roadmap to potential breakthroughs in solar energy technology”

From Michigan State University

June 11, 2020

Adrian de Novato
adenovato@gmail.com

James K. McCusker, MSU professor of chemistry. Photo by G.L. Kohuth

As policymakers increasingly turn toward science in addressing global climate change, one Michigan State University scientist is looking to nature to develop the next generation of solar energy technology.

MSU Foundation Professor James McCusker, Department of Chemistry, believes that the future of solar energy lies in abundant, scalable materials designed to mimic and improve upon the energy conversion systems found in nature.

In a groundbreaking new study in Nature, McCusker reveals a novel process that allows molecules to tell scientists how they should be modified to better absorb and convert solar energy. The method uses a molecular property known as quantum coherence where different aspects of a molecule are synchronous, like when your car’s turn signal blinks in unison with that of the car in front of you. Scientists believe that quantum coherence may play a role in natural photosynthesis.

“Our work is the first time anyone has tried to actively use information gleaned from quantum coherence as a guide — a roadmap — to suggest what are the most important aspects of a molecule’s structure that contribute to a given property,” McCusker said. “We are using sophisticated science that provides the means for nature to teach us what we need to focus on in the lab.”

Sunlight, although abundant, is a low-density energy source. To collect meaningful amounts of energy you need larger amounts of space. However, the most effective materials in use today for solar energy conversion, such as Ruthenium, are some of the rarest metals on Earth. Future solar technologies must be able to scale up with more efficient and cheaper methods of energy conversion.

“When I give talks about energy science at undergraduate schools or to the general public, I half-jokingly say that there are a lot of leaves on trees for a reason,” McCusker said. “Well, there are a lot of leaves for a reason: Light capture is a material-intensive problem because of the (relatively) low density of energy from sunlight. Nature solves this problem by producing a lot of leaves.”

Light-absorbing compounds in common synthetic methods for artificial photosynthesis make use of excited molecular states produced after a molecule absorbs energy from sunlight. The absorption of light energy exists long enough to be used in chemical reactions that rely on the ability to move electrons from one place to another. One possible solution is to find more commonly available materials that can achieve the same result.

“The problem with switching (from rare Earth metals) to something Earth-abundant like iron — where the scalability problem disappears — is that the processes that allow you to convert the absorbed sunlight into chemical energy are fundamentally different in these more widely available materials,” McCusker said. The excited state produced by absorbing light energy in an iron-based compound, for example, decays too quickly to enable its use in a similar manner.

Enter quantum coherence as the guide. By hitting a molecule with a burst of light lasting less than one-tenth of one trillionth of a second, McCusker and his students could observe the interconnection between the molecule’s excited state and its structure, allowing them to visualize how the atoms of the molecule were moving during the conversion of solar to chemical energy.

“Once we had a picture of how this process occurred, the team used that information to synthetically modify the molecule in such a way as to slow the rate of the process down,” McCusker said. “This is an important goal that must be achieved if these types of chromophores — a molecule that absorbs particular wavelengths of visible light and are responsible for a material’s color — are to find their way into solar energy technologies.”

“The research demonstrates that we can use this coherence phenomenon to teach us what sorts of things we might need to incorporate into the molecular structure of a chromophore that uses more earth-abundant materials to enable us to use the energy stored in the molecule upon absorption of light for a wide range of energy conversion applications.”

For McCusker, this breakthrough will hopefully speed up development of new technologies, “eliminating a lot of the trial and error that goes into scientific endeavors by telling us right out of the gate what kind of system we need to design.”

What next? “How about a solar cell based on paint chips and rust?” McCusker said. “We’re not there yet, but the idea behind this research is to use quantum coherence to tap into information that the molecule already possesses and then use that information to change the rules of the game.”

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. MSU was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

MSU pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, plant biology, supply chain management, and telecommunication. U.S. News & World Report ranks several MSU graduate programs in the nation’s top 10, including industrial and organizational psychology, osteopathic medicine, and veterinary medicine, and identifies its graduate programs in elementary education, secondary education, and nuclear physics as the best in the country. MSU has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

Following the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, MSU is the seventh-largest university in the United States (in terms of enrollment), with over 49,000 students and 2,950 faculty members. There are approximately 532,000 living MSU alumni worldwide.

From MSU: “Harvesting clues to GMO dilemmas from China’s soybean fields”

Michigan State University

Sept. 18, 2015
Sue Nichols

Jing Sun, a CSIS research associate, examines soybeans in a field in Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China. Courtesy of MSU

China’s struggle – mirrored across the globe – to balance public concern over the safety of genetically modified crops with a swelling demand for affordable food crops has left a disconnect: In China’s case, shrinking fields of domestic soybean – by law non-GM – and massive imports of cheaper soybeans that are the very GM crop consumers profess to shun.

Researchers at Michigan State University take a first look at how China’s soybean farmers are reacting when their crop struggles in the global market.

The study, published in this week’s journal Scientific Reports, has discovered what Chinese farmers are growing on lands once dominated by non-GM soy, as well as farmers bucking that trend and planting more. Researchers say these farming choices may offer solutions to a national dilemma.

“Many studies have focused on the global expansion of GM crops. However, the spatial and temporal changes of non-GM crops are not clear, although they have significant socioeconomic and environmental impacts as well as policy implications in the telecoupled world,” said Jianguo “Jack” Liu, Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability at MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability. “Understanding the finer points of growing soybeans will be a crucial step to managing a global enterprise.”

Demand for soybean as food, feed and oil has soared as China’s economy booms and eating habits change. China is now the world’s largest soybean importer – bringing in more than 80 percent of the soybeans consumed, mostly from Brazil and the United States. Those imported crops are GM crops.

Jing Sun, a research associate in CSIS, and his colleagues found that soybean farming in China is generally struggling as farmers switch to more profitable crops, with soybean fields shrinking and becoming more fragmented. But Sun also discovered surprising pockets of resilience and identified strengths in soybean cultivation that may point a way to give Chinese soybean consumers what they say they want.

“Cost versus food safety concerns is a dilemma in China, and consumers are pretending not to notice the soybeans they are getting are genetically modified,” Sun said. “Our work will help inform the Chinese government on the status of local soybean crops, which is an issue that transcends the GM controversy, and includes environmental concerns.”

Sun and colleagues scrutinized satellite data of the nation’s leading soybean-growing region, Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China. There they found farmers converting fields from soybean to corn but not without environmental consequence. Unlike soybeans, corn cannot use nitrogen in the soil, so it requires more fertilizers that can cause pollution.

Yet even as daunting market pressures reduce soy plantings, Sun’s analysis found surprising hotspots of soybeans. As it turns out, soybean farming has advantages that may point the way to a resurgence. Farmers in the north found soybeans more forgiving of cold springs and short growing seasons that can cause corn to fail. And for some, soybean farming is a powerful tradition.

The authors say China’s current dependence on foreign imports to fill its burgeoning soybean demand – and its decrease in domestic production – comes with potential costs around the globe, including the possibility of Amazon rainforest deforestation as Brazil ramps up soybean production to meet demand.

In addition to Liu and Sun, the paper was authored by Wenbin Wu and Huajun Tang of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and MSU AgBioResearch.

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. MSU was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

MSU pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, plant biology, supply chain management, and telecommunication. U.S. News & World Report ranks several MSU graduate programs in the nation’s top 10, including industrial and organizational psychology, osteopathic medicine, and veterinary medicine, and identifies its graduate programs in elementary education, secondary education, and nuclear physics as the best in the country. MSU has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

Following the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, MSU is the seventh-largest university in the United States (in terms of enrollment), with over 49,000 students and 2,950 faculty members. There are approximately 532,000 living MSU alumni worldwide.