Word: mineralization
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Coober Pedy is a small town but full of M-E-N. They'll argue all night, but God help you if you cross them. The cops aren't much use out here, and the men take justice into their own hands. Last month, a passing wannabe miner got into another man's mine and rifled a lode of opals that the owner had opened up but left unextracted. (He had taken off to the pub for a beer, committing the fatal error of letting on that he'd struck, and this was overheard by the thief.) His friends identified...
...fossilized backbones of archaic freshwater squid. The paradox of the stuff is that although it is so brilliantly colored, it has no color of its own. It's a solid diffraction grating, and the color you see is the light dispersed and reflecting through it. John Smart, the miner in whose mine we filmed, waxes reflective about this. "The opal's just a bloody illusion. It's as though you're spending your life down here digging for something that doesn't actually exist...
...ever feel jealous, I ask, when another miner makes the big strike? "Ah, no, Bob, it'd be pointless. You'd spend your whole life being jealous. I feel glad, actually. It keeps you believing that it could happen to you tomorrow. And if you go for six months without a strike, you've got to believe that. Otherwise you'd go crazy...
...year-old man clutching a walker as he shuffles down a prison hallway. Not exactly the usual image of a dangerous killer locked up for the good of society. Chances are, it's not what the judge envisioned either when he sentenced John Bedarka, a Pennsylvania coal miner, to life without parole for shooting his wife's lover to death 30 years ago. But Bedarka is still in prison at Laurel Highlands correctional institution in Somerset, Pa., in frail health, severely depressed and a threat...
With its flamboyant orange-and-black wings and incredible 1,000-mile migratory flights, the monarch butterfly is one of the world's best-known and most beloved insects. And like a miner's canary, it has become a kind of biological early-warning system, succumbing to environmental changes long before humans notice them. Last week the monarch sounded another alert--fanning new fears about bioengineered crops...