During the Second World War, a wag once remarked that the British Economy was like rubber, stretching itself in more and more directions to meet the efforts of arms production, food and all the other urgent requirements of the time. Economic historians record Herculean efforts at production. And equally ingenious efforts to scrimp, save and recycle to ensure that nothing useful was wasted. It was a long time ago, but could we still learn something from those days?

Britain’s Royal Mint thinks so. There job is to make all our coins, which they have been doing for hundreds of years. Some are made of gold ; and as they have astutely noted, the price of that metal has been soaring in recent years. Where to get more? Well something else has been soaring: the amount of high tech rubbish we all throw away so heedlessly. (not YOU, gentle reader: everyone else) Mobile phones, computers, entertainment systems of all kinds. Billions of items, thousands of tonnes. Well there may be a lot of gold in it, at concentrations higher than the ores processed by all those rugged manly chaps out in the mines and factories. And as Rebecca Morelle and Alison Francis report for the BBC the Royal Mint is now starting to mine it for gold, big time and turning the shiny stuff into lovely coins. How’s that for recycling. How’s that for a thoughtful use of resources in difficult times.

And the moral in all this? We in the LSS community (and the educated community more widely) are still members of the human family. It’s just that certain members of our family are highly unhappy, emotionally disturbed and not very nice. And this unhappiness comes out in things like drinking, violent emotional outbursts, riots, wars and things. But a family is a family. And the quieter sensible members get on because they have to. Inventing new technologies. Discovering new facts. Clearing up the mess. And we will continue to do so, until our day comes.

_{Question: How come Newsround had this in March and Big news didn’t get it until August? We don’t know either}

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6p2k11e41po

[2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/58971402

#gold #royal mint #recycling #waste #e waste

Foreign readers must be reeling in disbelief to see the home of Democracy (or at least representative government) and the bastion of law and order dissolving into ugly, uncontrollable race riots. Why? The whole business of tribalism, status anxiety, hierarchy and downright anger are themes we’ve tried to cover before on these humble pages (most recently LSS 12 7 24) But: we admit that somehow we have never quite got to then heart of the subject. Never quite captured its essence. Certainly not as well as Richard Fern of Swansea University, whose article for the Conversation is at once succinct and insightful. [1]

Richard points out how online trolls and agitators are adept at tapping into the deep pools of anger and resentment felt by many. As we have observed before in these pages, these feelings are rooted in a sense of helplessness, loss, bewilderment, powerlessness and a lack of any credible model of a better future. Attempts to counter such posts with rational facts are thereby useless. In this species, emotion will always blot out reason. At this moment, media attention is centred on irate white males. But by our logic, many ethnic and religious groups will also experience this disastrous syndrome.

And disastrous it will be. A reversion to a world of jealously polices ethnic rivalries will be neither stable nor happy. The histories of Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel should be testament sufficient of that. Economic outcomes must be suboptimal, as each nation looks for autarky, breaking Adam Smith‘s prime rule of specialisation and free trade. Unless ways are found to prize openness and liberty over exclusivity, the future looks dark indeed.

#adam smith #autarky #race riot #anxiety #tribalism #southport

Looking at the vast range of living creatures today makes us gasp at their diversity. From giant whales to tiny insects, and every imaginable variation in between. We know, from studies like genetics, embryology and fossils that all came from a single form. And that form had sufficient potential, enough plasticity in its DNA to slowly morph into every animal that has ever lived. What that earliest animal looked like, we can only conjecture, at the current state of knowledge. But there must have been quite an early diversification into creatures that at least represented the first members of the great phylae of animals. The first arthropod, the first vertebrate, the first mollusc ,nematode, and so on.

Two recent discoveries give us an exciting picture of what two of those may have been like: the first arthropod (ancestor of insects, spiders, shrimps, scorpions etc) And the first mollusc (ancestor to the amazing world of slugs, snails, clams and cephalopods). Researchers at Durham University have used advanced microscopical techniques to look at a tiny fossil [1] named Youti yuanshi which lived in what is now Yunnan about 520 million years ago. Details of its internal organs suggest it is close to the ancestors of all those jointy, segmented arthropods, probably the most successful and diverse group of animals on the planet. And not to be outdone, the molluscs have come up with their own Ur-ancestor, called Shishania aculeata, a kind of spiny slug which lived at around the same time. [2]

We will leave you to explore the details in the links which we have provided. We hope you will jump off from these to find out more. We will marvel at the skills and techniques of scientists who wring so much fresh learning from intricate new techniques. And above all at the window provided to the lives simple creatures in a warm sea half a billion years ago, who stood at the start of so much life.

[1]https://phys.org/news/2024-07-million-year-worm-fossil-mystery.html

[2]https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/half-a-billion-year-old-spiny-slug-reveals-the-origins-of-molluscs/ar-BB1r2wNG?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=d0f78bd5cd7

#genetics #embryology #evolution #arthropod #mollusc #yunnan

Well…..we weren’t expecting that. After publishing out last little post Six Mysteries which could do us all in, or whatever, we had our doubts. Was the tone all a bit …..admonitory? A bit peevish, like someone who had risen too early and really wanted to go back to bed. Too late! And we set off on our little rounds, you know, shopping, a few scaffolders to chase up, that sort of thing.

Imagine thereby our surprise at the flood of warm and approving comments we got, not only from the usual sources, however welcome the latter are. Many of you who put out serious multimedia websites in far-away America, on any number of serious subjects, took time to notice this one.

We must have got something right. Maybe our species really does need to stop trying so hard, and to think a bit more.

Anyway, as the say in the readers letters columns in the Financial Times Saturday magazine : “Keep ’em coming” We were quite impressed by some of your sites and blogs. Keep them coming too. We few, we happy few, may yet make a difference

THE EDITORIAL BOARD