Smartphones, wind turbines, electric vehicles, cloud computing. We live in an age of digital technologies powered by complex devices. Materials with specific functional properties are needed to produce them, obtained from increasingly diverse natural resources. Among these raw materials is a particular group of chemical elements known as rare earths.
The name is inaccurate. The term earths originally referred to metal oxides, and these chemical elements were first isolated as compounds with oxygen—not as pure metals. Today, we know they are abundant, although they were initially identified in small concentrations within scarce—or rare—mineral samples in Sweden. They are not often found in isolation, typically occurring together or mixed with other elements, which makes them difficult to separate.
Brazil has large reserves of rare earths but does not yet control the full production cycle. It also lacks the capacity to manufacture one of the key components in numerous high-tech products and processes: permanent rare-earth magnets. Research and development efforts are underway to try to fill this gap, as reported by Frances Jones and Yuri Vasconcelos in this issue’s cover story (page 12).
Biotechnological advances are bringing a theme once confined to science fiction closer to reality: the de-extinction of species. One recent well-known case was the announcement of the birth of a litter of dire wolves—animals that have been extinct for 10,000 years. It quickly became a hot topic in our newsroom, raising two questions: how do we determine de-extinction (is it enough, as in the case of the dire wolves, to insert desirable traits of the extinct species into a related one)? And what is the aim of recreating dire wolves, mammoths, or other animals?
Our Biological Sciences editor, Maria Guimarães, set out to understand the history of dire wolves. She returned with answers and a report on refaunation that proved even more interesting than the original debate. The approach is not only a matter of restoring vegetation and preserving or reintroducing endangered animal species into the wild. The aim is to restore both species and processes (such as seed dispersal) to increase the resilience and self-sufficiency of recovering ecosystems (page 42).
Coincidentally, this issue features interviews with two doctors: epidemiologist Maria Paula Curado of A.C.Camargo Cancer Center and neonatologist Maria Elisabeth Moreira of FIOCRUZ. Curado is searching for patterns in cancer occurrence across the population and was recently honored for her professional career (page 22), while the interview with Moreira was motivated by the 10-year anniversary of the Zika epidemic (page 64). Both offer deeply human perspectives. For Curado, cancer must not be seen only as statistics. “There is always a person, a social impact.” Moreira, who is following 180 children exposed to the Zika virus in the womb, is unhappy with the way these families have been neglected.
Finally, the Vaga-lume and Para Gostar de Ler book series, published by Ática, have impacted generations of readers since the 1970s. Jiro Takahashi, responsible for these editorial success stories, is one of the figures featured in a report putting the spotlight on book editors (page 86).
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