rare earth minerals

I came back to my computer to find that many of my fellow Sciblings have recently taken up issues of resource depletion from various interesting perspectives - doing my work for me, I guess ;-). It isn't exactly news to most of us that we've been using just about every resource on the planet far too casually, but it is interesting to see them tied together. At Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel takes up issues raised by Helium's scarcity and the fact that our use of it to make children's toys may seriously imperil future research capacities. At Dr. Isis's blog, she builds on this by exploring…