Financial economist Dirk Baur argues that it’s both environmentally and economically unviable to mine gold despite its increasing value. For a resource that’s expensive to extract and taxing on the environment and the surrounding communities, there’s little payoff as most gold ends up inside bank vaults and investment companies. If investors will be buying gold they’ll never see, then Baur offers an alternative: “green gold”, or underground gold identified by mining companies that will remain unmined. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
