Zoology. Science | London Zoo. Exoplanet Reflects Practically No Light—and Scientists Have No Idea Why | 80beats. Redhead Extinction" In August 2007, many news organizations reported that redheads or "gingers," as our British and Australian friends call them, would eventually become extinct. Other news outlets and blogs picked up the story, citing the "Oxford Hair Foundation" or "genetic scientists" who claimed that there would be no more redheads by as early as 2060 [source: The Courier Mail].
It turns out that all those people were wrong. Redheads are here to stay and should be around well beyond 2060. The story of redhead extinction has gone around the Internet before, most recently in 2005, with news articles again citing the Oxford Hair Foundation as a source. These articles work on the mistaken assumption that recessive genes -- like the one for red hair -- can "die out. " Recessive genes can become rare but don't disappear completely unless everyone carrying that gene dies or fails to reproduce. Experts who have been interviewed agree that the redhead extinction claim is bogus. 4 Rare Earth Elements That Will Only Get More Important. Sir William Crookes, a 19th century British chemist, once wrote that, "rare earth elements perplex us in our researches, baffle us in our speculations and haunt us in our very dreams.
" These weren't easy elements to isolate or to understand, and so there was a very long lag time between the discovery of the rare earths, and the discovery of practical uses for them. It didn't help that individual rare earth elements don't occur by their lonesome—they travel in packs. To get one, you have to mine all of them. At first, industry didn't even bother to separate out individual rare earths, instead using them in a blended alloy called mischmetal. This provided the first commercial applications, says Karl Gschneidner, senior metallurgist at the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. In 1891, mischmetal became an ingredient in lamp mantles—devices that were hung above open flames, where they burned and produced a bright, white light you could see and work by.
Journal home : Nature. Raphael Lis, Charles C. Karrasch, Michael G. Poulos, Balvir Kunar, David Redmond, Jose G. Barcia Duran, Chaitanya R. Badwe, William Schachterle, Michael Ginsberg, Jenny Xiang, Arash Rafii Tabrizi, Koji Shido, Zev Rosenwaks, Olivier Elemento, Nancy A. Speck, Jason M.