My Science School

About five years ago, near to where I now live, a woman was driving along the road and saw greenish-yellow smoke rising from the field at the side of the road. This turned out to be a number of gas shells which had corroded to the point of leaking. It’s a common occurrence here to turn up armaments as this was the Verdun Battlefield. An estimated sixty million shells were fired into the battle area over the nine months of fighting and the general opinion is that between 10% and 25% were duds/unexploded. That’s anything up to 15 million shells still in the ground after the battle. It’s common here to go to a brocante (car boot sale) and there will be stalls with various bits of ordnance for sale. One individual, having bought one of these, tried to open it with an angle grinder. Luckily, the casualties of WW1 are getting fewer every year.

 

Credit : Quora

Picture Credit : Google

Skyscrapers are first and foremost a space saving measure in places where you have to cram plenty of office space into a downtown location in order to accommodate all the people who are going to work there.

The notion that a skyscraper is a sign of development and affluence comes from places that have no space.

Sweden doesn’t need skyscrapers for two reasons:

• we actually have space in our cities.


• many operations are shifted to small towns because in this day and age, there is no need to confine everyone physically to a big city location, and then pay crazy rents.

When you live in Sweden, you notice that all your bills come from obscure little towns, not from Stockholm.

Why put a skyscraper in there?

There are some high buildings here, but if you’ve been to Shanghai or Hong Kong, they look pretty quaint. 

 

Credit : Quora

Picture Credit : Google

Iron mining in Western Australia produced 826 million tons of iron ore in 2018, which will convert to roughly several hundred million tons of iron metal. (Note that ratio of ore to metal.) The scale of Australian extraction of iron ore is quite impressive. Those piles in the first picture? That’s iron ore, a mountain of it.

Iron ores are easily accessible, easily converted to iron metal, and can be found in vast quantities. Iron ore is so plentiful that Australia makes a profit selling the ore at $100 to $170 (Australian dollars) per ton. That’s pennies per pound of iron ore, never mind the cost per troy ounce.

Aluminum is also produced in huge quantities, with tens of millions of tons of metal made per year. Aluminum is found in a number of rich deposits of bauxite (available by the tens of billions of tons around the world) that converts from 2 tons of bauxite to 1 ton of aluminum metal.

But gold?

Gold’s yield from rock is measured in ounces per ton of ore. Gold mines may have to extract up to 100 tons of rock to get an ounce of gold.

If those 826 million tons of Australian iron ore were gold-bearing rock instead then you might get as little as 230 tons of gold from them. (Current global gold production is about 3,100 tons per year.)

Further, gold deposits are not as common as iron ores or aluminum ores.

That’s why gold isn’t going to be treated as an inexpensive metal like iron or aluminum. It just isn’t as common or easily found. Iron and aluminum actually make up a significant percentage of Earth’s mass; gold does not.

Gold is subject to some odd consumer demand that drives up its price unnecessarily at times, but one reason for its high cost is that it’s hard to extract and isn’t nearly as common as iron or aluminum.

 

Credit : Quora

Picture Credit : Google