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Frontal section of Phalangium opilio (Harvestman/Daddy longlegs) eyes (Image: Igor Siwanowicz/2010 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition)

This psychedelic photo is a depth color-coded projection of a confocal microscope image of the eyes of a daddy longlegs (Phalangium opilio). The image, by Igor Siwanowicz of the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in Munich, Germany, was awarded first place in the Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition, which honors microscope images of life science subjects. Siwanowicz also won seventh place for his photo of the eye of a common blue damselfly (Enallagma cyathigerum). These images and the other winners can all be viewed online.

Since we’re on the topic of photo contests, have you entered Smithsonian magazine’s 8th annual photo contest yet? You have until 2:00 pm EST on December 1, 2010. Enter your photos in one of five categories: Altered Images, Americana, the Natural World, People and Travel. But don’t worry if you miss the deadline; the ninth contest starts on March 1, 2011.

Check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week on our Facebook page.

Given their name, rare earth elements, and the fact that China controls 96 percent of REE production, you might think the Chinese had won some geologic lottery. But these metallic substances—elements 57 to 71 on the periodic table, plus scandium and yttrium—are not all that rare. It’s been economic and scientific smarts, not geologic luck, that has given China its near monopoly on these elements.

REE are almost ubiquitous in  modern technology because they’re incredibly useful. They are the “vitamins of chemistry,” says Daniel Cordier, a mineral commodities specialist for rare earths at the U.S. Geological Survey. “They help everything perform better, and they have their own unique characteristics,” he says, “particularly in terms of magnetism, temperature resistance and resistance to corrosion.” Those characteristics have helped REE find homes in everything from flat-panel TVs and smart phones to anti-lock brakes and air bags in cars, from sunglasses and crystal to lasers and smart bombs.

The rare earths were common when Earth was accreting, and so they are more abundant in the inner parts of the planet. They concentrate on the surface only in places where mantle eruptions have worked their way up through the crust, mostly in igneous materials. But unlike more familiar metals, such as gold and copper, rare earths don’t clump in single-element chunks. Instead, the REE all wait together as hot rocks are crystallizing. “They tend to follow phosphate around and hang out until the very end,” says Cordier, “and then they’ll crystallize out.” Recoverable concentrations can be found in several minerals, such as bastnaesite and monazite. But refining these minerals into individual elements takes many days of heavy processing.

The Mountain Pass mine once dominated rare earth element production (via wikimedia commons)

The United States has one of the richest REE deposits in the world, at Mountain Pass in California, but as interest in rare earths declined in this country in the late 20th century, China’s interest was heating up. Chinese scientists had visited during the Nixon Administration and taken their knowledge home, applying it to their own rich deposits. By the end of the 20th century, they were able to undersell the competition and drive most of the rest of the world out of the business. “They now sit in the driver’s seat,” says Cordier.

Earlier this year, China blocked REE exports to Japan, renewing concerns about the Chinese monopoly and prompting new calls for developing rare earth production elsewhere. The Mountain Pass mine, which has been inactive for several years, is scheduled to start up again in 2011. A new report from the USGS documents REE deposits in 13 additional states, and India, Australia and Canada are planning to get into the rare earths business more heavily.

And anyone looking for new REE deposits could benefit from the years of Chinese work in this area. Most of the world’s heavy rare earths come from ionic adsorption clays in southeast China, Cordier says, and no one has really looked at this type of clay elsewhere in the world. “There’s a lot of opportunity for exploration,” he says.

Make mayonnaise at home and you'll quickly see that oil and water mix, with a little help (courtesy of flickr user FotoosVanRobin)

After tackling the phrase “comparing apples and oranges” a couple weeks ago, a co-worker suggested I take a look at “mixing like oil and water.” O.K. Here goes:

The phrase, as we know, is applied to any two things that don’t get along together. And it’s not a bad analogy; oil and water won’t immediately mix. Water molecules are polar and one end has a slight negative charge, the other a slight positive charge. Those charges let the molecules form hydrogen bonds and attach to other molecules that are polar, including other water molecules. Oil molecules, however, are non-polar, and they can’t form hydrogen bonds. If you put oil and water in a container, the water molecules will bunch up together and the oil molecules will bunch up together, forming two distinct layers.

To get around the propensity of oil and water molecules to only pal around with each other, you’ll have to make an emulsion, dispersing one of the liquids in the other. It’s possible to create an unstable emulsion through vigorous shaking or mixing; an example would be an oil-and-water vinaigrette, which separates if left too long on the table. To get a stable emulsion, you’ll have to add an emulsifier.

An emulsifier is a molecule that has a hydrophobic (non-polar) end and a hydrophilic end. The molecules of the emulsifier will surround tiny droplets of oil, attaching the hydrophobic ends to it and leaving the hydrophilic ends exposed so the now-surrounded oil can easily mix among the water molecules. Common food emulsions are stable vinaigrettes that contain mustard and mayonnaise, which uses the molecule lecithin from egg yolks as the emulsifier.

Oil and water will mix, you see, they just need a little help.

Oil production peaked four years ago, according to the IAE (image courtesy of flickr user FreeWine)

Oil is a finite resource. Eventually it will run out. For the last century, oil production (meaning extraction and refining) has kept increasing, keeping up with demand for the most part. But that won’t last forever, and at some point production levels will begin to decline. That point—known as “peak oil”—isn’t the end of oil, but it is the end of cheap, abundant oil. And as oil gets ever more scarce, it will get even more expensive and hard to obtain.

Geologist M. King Hubbert developed the concept of peak oil back in the 1950s, and he later predicted that it would occur around 1995 to 2000 (he wasn’t expecting the energy crisis in the 1970s, when production dipped). Peak oil forecasts have varied wildly, with some experts arguing that it won’t be a problem anytime soon and others predicting the peak within a decade. This is the trouble with predicting the future. You won’t see peak oil until it has passed.

Well, last week, the International Energy Agency, which only two years ago was predicting a slow and steady increase in oil production, said that the peak has passed, and that oil production topped out in 2006 (Hubbert got it pretty close, apparently). The decline will be gradual, at least, they say, with production plateauing for a decade or two, but there are complicating factors, like increased demand from China.

We’ve already extracted the easy-to-reach, high-quality stuff already and are moving on to smaller fields, to lower-quality oil, to riskier off-shore locations (like Deepwater Horizon). And while natural gas might be able to replace oil in some applications, it can’t be easily shipped, and we’ve already peaked on that fossil fuel here in the United States.

To make matters even worse, a new study in Environmental Science & Technology estimates that we’ll run out of oil 90 years before replacement energy technologies are abundant enough to replace the oil.

So where does that leave us? The days of dollar-a-gallon gasoline and high demand for energy-guzzling SUVs are but a distant memory. But it’s far worse than that. Oil is used in the production of pharmaceuticals, plastics and electronics. Growing and transporting food takes an incredible amount of energy from oil. Smaller supplies of more expensive oil will affect us in myriad ways. If we’re lucky, the decline in oil production will be slow enough that we can adapt. If not, all bets are off.

Learning to read affects our brains (photo courtesy of flickr user ckaroli)

Two facts about me: I read quickly and a lot. And I’m horrible at remembering faces. These may seem to be random characteristics, but a new study in Science indicates that they could actually be connected.

An international group of neuroscientists scanned the brains of 63 Portuguese and Brazilian participants with an fMRI machine, which lets researchers see active areas of the brain. Of the participant group, 10 were illiterate, 22 had learned to read as adults, and 31 learned as children. The scientists looked at how the brains responded to activities like reading, hearing sentences and looking at objects such as faces, tools, strings of letters and moving checkerboards.

An area of the brain known as the “visual word form area,” or VWFA, in the occipital cortex lit up when readers saw words or when any of the participants heard words. It also lit up in response to faces, but less in the literate volunteers. “The intriguing possibility,” the scientists write, “[is] that our face perception abilities suffer in proportion to our reading skills.” Previous studies have suggested that reading uses the same network that evolved to help humans track prey animals.

But it’s not all bad news for us readers. The researchers say that learning to read has benefits for our visual cortices and for processing of spoken language.

Will that be an adequate excuse the next time I fail to recognize someone I’ve met before?