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Canada continues to mine asbestos and export the fibers to this day, in spite of many health concerns. by Eric Stevenson Asbestos was a highly used and valuable mineral; now most countries consider it to be anything but that. It first mined in the great white north in the 1870’s and continued on to help cities thrive off the resource into the next century. Miners started to contract terminal illnesses such as lung cancer, mesothelioma , and asbestosis in the 1900’s after developing an initial shortness of breath on the mining sites. The exposure to asbestos has since been revealed as the main cause for some of these diseases. The asbestos exposure affects a thin lining of the lungs, chest, abdomen, and heart. Perhaps the worst part about this type of exposure is the fact that mesothelioma symptoms lay dormant in a latency period that can sometimes last up to 50 years. Diagnosis often comes late in life, with such a long latency period. The mesothelioma life expectancy is an...

Plants can also help us in finding uranium. by Dr. Nitish Priyadarshi Fig. Aster Venusta Name of the plant in the figure below is Astraqualus sp. Geobotanical methods of prospecting involve the use of vegetation for identification of the nature and properties of the substrate. Paradoxically, these methods are among the easiest to execute and yet the most difficult to interpret of all the methods of exploration available at the present time. In terms of execution, the basic requirement is merely a pair of human eyes; but in the interpretation of the visual (or photographic) image, some knowledge is required of a number of different disciplines such as biochemistry, botany, chemistry, ecology, geology, and plant physiology. Geobotanical methods of prospecting are based on the visual observation and identification of vegetation or plant cover that may reveal the presence of a specific type of sub-surface mineralization. In this method, it is presumed that a particular variety of plant s...