The Download: mining metals with plants, and our dystopian future
Nickel may not grow on trees—but there’s a chance it could someday be mined using plants. Many plants naturally soak up metal and concentrate it in their tissues. The US government is now spending $9.9 million funding research on how to use that trait for plant-based mining, or phytomining.
It could be a good new way to source increasingly in-demand metals like nickel, crucial for the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles. But for now, the goal is just to better understand which plants could help with mining and determine how researchers can tweak them to get our hands on all the critical metals we’ll need in the future. Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
The year is 2149 and…
—An excerpt from a short story written for us by novelist Sean Michaels, which envisions what life will look like 125 years from now.
The year is 2149 and people mostly live their lives “on rails.” That’s what they call living according to the meticulous instructions of software. Software knows most things about you—what causes you anxiety, what raises your endorphin levels, everything you’ve ever searched for, everywhere you’ve been.
Software understands everything that has led to this instant and it predicts every moment that will follow. There was a time when everybody kept their data to themselves, but the truth is, it works better to combine it all. So they poured it all together, all the data—the Big Merge. Everything into a giant basin, a Federal Reserve of information—a vault, or really a massively distributed cloud. It is very handy. It shows you the best route.
