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We have a hard time differentiating a banana from a banana. And an illegal network was taking advantage of it in Spain

May 14, 2025 by usatoday24

Although for years the Spanish public has trained to know how to differentiate between a banana and a banana, the truth is that it is not easy. The best example has just given us the Civil Guard. Or, rather, the Alicante company that It is being investigated for spending more than 2,000 tons of banana imported by banana of the protected geographical indication of the Canary Islands banana. And that only in 2023. A millionaire fraud uncovered by a breath. Because since 2021 the company in question It was part of one of the six official marketing entities of the Association of Organizations of bananas producers of the Canary Islands (ASPROCAN). And if they have caught them, it was because a third sent an email to the association with A video in which it was seen The operators will unveil Bananas de Madeira and put them “on the tape where they are automatically packaged and labeled” with the distinctives of the Canarian banana. Is it difficult to identify each other? Yes and no. Indeed there are substantive differences between bananas and bananas. The former are smaller: 135.5 grams on average compared to 237.7 and about 15 cm compared to about 20 of the second. In addition, their curvature is much more evident, their flesh is more yellow and, of course, they have motites on the skin. For the rest, although there are densities in flavor, texture, caloric density and Other nutrients and organoleptic properties, They are very little significant. It is controversial to say it, but the truth is that the main difference between them are its geographical origin: the banana is Canary and the banana is usually cultivated in Africa and Latin America. That origin is important because it gives the product of certain peculiarities (which go beyond the nutritional and even arrive At the time of maturation in plant), but they are not enough to avoid problems and confusion. That is why IGP has been investing so much in ensuring its main market: Spanish. In the middle of the nightmare. According to what has transcended, the illegal network was working precisely during what It has been known as the ‘great nightmare’. From January 2023 to October 2024, only in three months of the 22 the banana had a price that we could call profitable. But that is a problem only for producers. The plot, making banana (considerably cheaper) by banana, had a very considerable margin. It was an almost perfect scam. From the Canary Islands they ask for traceability. And it makes sense: the Canarian banana is not just a fruit, it is all An industrial policy for the islands that has mechanisms regional, national and community in their favor. For years they have worked on ‘techniques’ for consumers to identify them easily (such as the famous sticker): you cannot leave the market to stop trusting them. The problem goes further, of course. The reality of the Canary Islands banana, such as that of most Spanish agriculture It is complicated: we talk about a perfectly greased industry, but that has long lived under regulations that came good. The opening of international markets and the arrival of fierce competition have made clear something that we had suspected for a long time: that our agricultural sector is A giant with mud feet and that if we want to remain leaders, we will have to make important decisions. We will have to do it sooner rather than later. Image | Pepelopex | Steve Hopson In Xataka | We go to the most expensive chocolate in history: how the cocoa crisis will shoot its price

If the question was how Rare eeuu would get after China’s veto, the answer is: hard drives

April 22, 2025 by usatoday24

SSD units may have become the norm in our PCs and laptops, but traditional hard drives continue to have a huge specific weight. This type of storage supports have an additional advantage of which some companies want to take advantage of: they contain Rare earth. Recycling against Chinese restrictions. Last week Western Digital advertisement which has created an important hard -record recycling program. He has done it in collaboration with Microsoft and with specialized companies such as CMR (material critical rcycling) and Pedalpoint Recycling. Picaresque economy for the US. The recycling process will take place in factories located in the United States, and those materials would precisely be used in other manufacturing processes also in the North American country. It’s about A singular measure that is necessary before the difficulties that USA will now have to access Those materialsand it is an example of how the country – like others – will have to go to ingenious solutions to solve the problems derived from the commercial war with China. Hidden rare metals. The objective of this initiative is to obtain rare earth oxides containing disposses, neodymium and proseodimium. Along with these rare metals it is also possible to obtain aluminum, steel, gold, paladium and copper. Hard discs to Gogó. This type of storage support is used massively in large data centers used for example for cloud infrastructure, and their life cycles causes units to be discarded constantly to avoid data losses. WD states that they have already recovered 21.3 tons of hard drives, SSD units and trays in which they are usually encapsulated in those data centers. According to Financial Timeshard drives in data centers have a useful life between three and five years, and it is estimated that the amount of waste globally in this area reaches 75 million tons in 2030. Recycling seems to work. The company responsible highlight that they have managed to recycle 90% of those rare metals, and 80% for the rest of the materials that you want to recycle. A complex but effective process. The discs come from Microsoft data centers and are sent to Pedalpoint to be ordered and processed. The magnets and steel are sent to CMR, and this company makes use of a recycling process called “dissolution without acids” (ADR) which is the one that extracts rare earths. This technology uses a copper salts solution to create a selective leaching that produces 99.5% pure rare oxides. The company avoids aggressive chemicals that could damage these rare earths or adjacent materials, such as aluminum. And more sustainable. According to The study Of the Digital Western engineers, this recycling process produces 95% less greenhouse gases than the traditional mining of these rare and material earths. Recycling hard drives is increasingly interesting. WD’s announcement is striking, especially considering that Microsoft is also involved in that project. However, hard drives recycling has been an area in which some startups are focusing clearly. We talked recently about Hypromag and Cyclic Materialsand in both cases the objective is the same: extract rare earths with recycled hard drives, as WD does. There is Other options underwayof course. But. The collection of these rare earth metals through recycling processes is striking, but China has restricted the export of seven rare metalsand only one of them (Disposio) is commonly used in hard drives. Image | Wikimedia | Barez Omer In Xataka | The US will not be able to contain the technological development of China. Experts from the chips industry forecast it

A startup claims to have the weapon to end China’s monopoly on rare earths: hard drives

February 22, 2025 by usatoday24

In the technological era and Energy transition to renewables and the electric car In which we are, the Rare earth They have become the most valuable currency. This set of elements has become essential for many industries, but there is a problem: China dominates both mining and, above all, Rare Earth Metals Productionand he does not hesitate to use them as a throwing weapon in the Technological and Commercial War in which we are. While west Decide which are the next steps In the search for the gold of the 21st century, there are already those who work to obtain rare earth elements from wherever it is thanks to recycling. And that hard drive that has been in the drawer for years is a treasure. ‘Chrysistunity’. “Rare earth” is the name with which we call a group of 17 minerals that are used to manufacture components of electric car batteries, precision medical instruments, speakers or elements of wind turbines, among many other applications in virtually all sectors. Taking them out of the earth is not as much problem as their refining, since it is a process that does not get along with Western pollution restrictions. That is why we were delegating this task to China and, now, the Asian giant dominates practically 90% of production. So important are that the country usually uses the export of rare earth metals when it receives a new western commercial blow and even in the Ukraine War we have seen Trump condition US support to the supply of rare earth. But before each crisis, there is an opportunity. Old hard drives. In the absence of being able to produce them, why not get those elements through recycling? With the plastic we do not do it very well, but with other elements, and in the case of rare earths, it is something that can work. That is precisely what the company has proposed Hypromaga startup founded by personnel from the Metallurgy and Materials School of the University of Birmingham that, as we read in Financial Timeshas focused on the recycling of hard drives. These components once dominated our PCs and, although they remain of great value as external discs and, above all, as components for NAS systems, they have gradually been separated by much faster SSDs and that have been lowering price. And these hard drives have some components that are manufactured thanks to rare earth elements, such as magnets that allow their operation. Recycling. Gavin MUDD is the director of the Critical Mineral Intelligence Center of the United Kingdom and comments that the country imports between 5,000 and 10,000 tons of rare earth magnets every year in the form of finished products and components, but only 1% of that figure Recycle. He affirms that it is not an isolated case and that it is an amount similar to that of other industrialized nations. “We need to consider future domestic production, and that leads us to consider recycling,” he says. And that is where Hypromag technology comes into play. They claim that their technique allows them to extract the magnets that contain rare earths, which weigh between 10% and 15% of the hard disk itself, and obtain the elements sought. To do this, they have a great drum that they fill with even a ton of waste at the same time and, after closing the hermetic doors, introduce pure hydrogen inside. Then, hydrogen unstals enter the fissures of the magnets, causing them to break and separate them from the surrounding material. After this process, which lasts between four and eight hours, a powder composed mainly of the ingredients of the magnet – the neodymium – falls to the bottom of the container, while other elements such as steel, nickel and aluminum are separated and also can also be recycle. Subsequently, they grind the sifted material and an alloy occurs that can become a magnet again. Different approaches. There is another company that is in garlic and that has also spoken with Financial Times with a tone of competition that, in the end, is the one that can advance the industry of rare earth recycling. This company is called Material Cyclic And he affirms that his method is better than that of “magnet to magnet” because he allowed to crumble each component of the elements instead of separating magnets, on the one hand, iron and steel on the other. Ahmad Ghahreman is the executive director of this company and affirms that its approach allows companies to use the rare lands as they want, not only as magnets. And he compared the two approaches with the recycling metaphor of a pizza: “When recycles pizza with our technology, raisins from flour pizza, salt, pepper and all other ingredients. With the other, pass from pizza to the dough. ” An ambitious patch. Despite competitiveness in his words, Ghahreman considers that both methods are valid and “profitable.” In 2024 they produced 100 tons of rare earth oxides, but they hope to reach 600 tons for the end of this year. In addition, they have plans to open another plant in the United States with a capacity of 1,200 tons per year and have plans to open facilities in Canada and Europe in 2028. Hypromag, on the other hand, hopes to produce between 25 and 30 tons per year in its first phase, but with extension plans to 350 tons thanks to a new plant in Germany and another 1,000 tons of annual alloys with a projected plant in Texas. They are less concrete plans, but the objective of both companies is the same. Clue. Allan Walton, the founder of Hypromag, comments that this technology “is a way of extracting large amounts of rare earths and creating a domestic supply,” and the truth is that the recycling of rare earths is something that has been speaking for years, but It was always a challenge. And it is something that is being sought in various parts of the world. For example, … Read more

It is safer, efficient and hard more

February 17, 2025 by usatoday24

During the last five years the modular and compact fission reactorsknown as SMR for its English denomination (Small Modular Reactor), have monopolized all the prominence. These machines are called replace reactors of nuclear fission Conventional because, without investigating their peculiarities, they are smaller, clean, safe and cheap. However, it is currently innovating in this field beyond the reactors. Another area to which some research and companies are dedicating their resources is the fuel used in this form of electricity generation. As we explain in the article we publish after visiting The fuel bars factory That the Spanish public company enusa advanced industries in Salamanca, the fuel usually used in the fission reactors is made up of slightly enriched uranium oxide (never above 5%). This means that at most only 5% of the total mass of uranium is the Uranium-235 isotope (which is the “easily” fistable), while the rest is mostly Uranium-238. It may seem that there is very little uranium-235 in front of the total mass of uranium, but in reality this amount is sufficient to sustain the reaction of nuclear fission. On the other hand, this is the proportion set by international regulations for the production of fuel for nuclear power plants. An interesting note: nuclear weapons use high enrichment uranium, so more than 90% of the total mass is Uranium-235. Lightbridge Fuel is ready to replace the conventional fuel To manufacture the fuel bars used by most of the reactors in operation, it is necessary to subject the uranium to the mixing, pressed, sintering, rectified and inspection processes. These procedures are carried out in an area of the factory known as the ceramic area, and the mechanical area takes over to manufacture the combustible elements that will finally go to nuclear power plants. What the American company Lightbridge Corporation proposes with its Lightbridge Fuel nuclear fuel is different. The main contribution of the Lightbridge Fuel fuel is that in its production a process known as coextrition is involved Its fuel has been designed to be used in light water reactors and existing heavy water pressurized, so it has been developed with the vocation of replace traditional fuel bars. The main contribution of the Lightbridge Fuel fuel is that in its production a process known as coextrition is involved. It consists of covering the cylindrical pills of impoverished uranium and zirconium with an alloy of zirconium and then subdue this structure at high pressure in a die with the purpose of shapeing a cylindrical rod of approximately 2.4 meters long. Circonium alloy used in the coating is crucial to confine radioactive fuel within the nuclear reactor. In any case, the really important thing is that according to its creators the Lightbridge fuel fuel Stop in several key parameters to the conventional fuel. “By integrating the uranium and zirconium alloy with a nuclear degree coating material we are improving the safety, efficiency and fuel performance,” Assures Scott HolcombeVice President of Engineering of Lightbridge Corporation. If this fuel finally exceeds all relevant security tests and is approved by the regulatory authorities in the future, it can also be used in modular and compact reactors (SMR). More information | Interesting Engineering In Xataka | China advances at a dizzying speed in nuclear fusion. It already has something ready that until now only had the Netherlands

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