Hacker News Reader

A few years ago Bruce Sterling gave an interesting talk about the future of materials science, among other things. One of the highlights of the talk is his discussion of "mining the dumps". These metals won't go away that easily. In many cases, we are concentrating them into convenient future mining sites (dumps)

View on HN

There's an interesting series on Slate at the moment - blogging the periodic table - where Sam Kean discusses how humans are changing some elements (particularly phosphorous) away from their usable state. They won't disappear, but they won't necessarily be re-mined as readily as some metals.

http://www.slate.com/id/2258112/entry/2258053/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com