Your hybrid car might not be so green

So it turns all those hybrid car owners who turn their environmentally conscious noses up have an unexpected caveat to their green-ness--their cars are sucking up rare earth metals at a disturbing rate. Rare earth elements take up 17 slots on the periodic table, and are named not for their overall scarcity (they're actually quite common in trace elements throughout the Earth's core) but for the relatively uncommon minerals in which they were originally found; few rare earth elements exist in pure elemental form naturally.

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The new manufacturing economy

The human (Homo Sapien) is constructed of 2,900,000,000 units of DNA, or base-pairs. This immense network of variant combinations of ATCG can be thought of as Code, much like binary code. Between you and me and the next person there is less than a 3% variance in that code, and that is what makes you, you, and not me. If you look at the sequencing of the ATCG’s, you can understand the code for how everything about you operates, from behavior, to skin pigmentation to cancer; and one step further trace the exact evolution of your code back to what specific type of primordial ooze you evolved from.

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