What are rare earth elements and why are they important?
So-called rare earth elements refer to 17 chemically-similar, silvery-white elements that are used to make magnets – which in turn power motion for electric vehicles, cell phones, missile systems and other electronics. But how critical are they, and are they actually rare? Eric Onstad explains.
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE I've spent years studying natural disasters... here's how likely an apocalyptic-level event really is
A man who has spent years studying natural disasters has revealed how likely an apocalyptic-level event really is. With doomsday shows and movies like The Last Of Us, Don't Look Up, and 28 Years Later taking over screens, many people are often left wondering: can something like that really happen? Thankfully, expert Anthony Finchum, 31, from Omaha, Nebraska, broke down the chances of an incident occurring in our lifetime that will wipe out the human race. And he explained that while it may make for good cinema, the chances of an event like that really happening are actually pretty slim. 'So this is a difficult question to answer. In practice, there are very few ways that an actual apocalyptic level event could happen,' he explained. Anthony, who runs the Disastrous History podcast, said a 'giant hurricane or wildfire' destroying the entire planet is not possible. And while he explained that things like a 'pandemic, asteroid impact, large volcanic eruption, or unregulated climate change' could potentially end our existence, he added that a lot of 'factors would have to align' for it to reach an apocalyptic level. 'Something like a giant hurricane or a giant wildfire or something along those lines is impossible,' he said. With doomsday shows and movies like The Last Of Us and 28 Years Later taking over screens, many people are often left wondering: can something like that really happen? 'There are upper limits on the strength of just about every disaster based on what the earth's atmosphere can handle weather wise and things of that nature. 'The primary [ways the world could end] are pandemic, asteroid impact, a large volcanic eruption, and unregulated climate change. 'But [to reach] the level of apocalyptic, there's a vanishingly small chance because so many precise factors have to align in order for one to occur.' Originally from Indiana, Anthony has lived through several natural disasters, including several tornadoes and blizzards as well as one 'derecho,' which is an intense wind storm. In addition, throughout his career as a first responder and fire investigator, he has assisted in numerous rescues during hurricanes, tornadoes and fires. He explained to the Daily Mail that he has 'always had an interest' in understanding how and why they occur. He would lay in bed at night researching and reading obsessively on past disastrous events, wracking up unrivaled knowledge on the topic. All of that led to him launching his Disastrous History podcast in 2020, where he uses his knowledge to instruct others on what to do if they find themselves facing a natural disaster. 'I really wanted to educate people that yes, these are bad but they are survivable and recovery is always possible,' he explained. 'I have found that breaking these things down into small and manageable pieces makes them seem less scary as they are happening and give people a way to react properly in a stressful situation. 'I feel that understanding the disasters of the past helps us to grow and prevent disasters of all types from happening in the future.' He also shared vital tips to surviving tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and fires exclusively with the Daily Mail. For tornadoes, he said the 'best option' is to head down to the basement, and if you don't have one, then he suggested bunkering down in the 'most center section of your home.' 'A tornado has unlimited energy but only a finite time to use it,' he explained. 'The more you barriers you can put between yourself and a tornado the better. 'When you are in a tornado watch, its time to get things together, hard soled shoes, flashlights, first aid kit, charge your phones, things like that so you're ready in case you have to take shelter quickly.' As for hurricanes, Anthony said the way you react depends on where you are located. And if you live near a beach, he explained that 'evacuation is your best option.' In practice, there are very few ways that an actual apocalyptic level event could happen,' he explained. He's seen with his family 'Storm surge and flooding is the main cause of death in hurricanes,' he shared. 'Because warning time for hurricanes is so long, the best option will always be to simply not be there anymore. 'If that is not an option, sheltering from high winds is similar to a tornado. Get to an interior room without windows. 'If flooding becomes a concern go to the highest available floor without going into the attic. Going into the attic could cause you to become trapped with no escape.' If an earthquake hits, the expert said you should 'place yourself under the sturdiest furniture you can find and protect your head and neck.' He also stated that despite contrary belief, it is not recommended to 'stand in a doorway.' Lastly, if your house has caught fire or if there's a wildfire nearby, Anthony suggested you get as far away as possible. 'Get out. Whether it is a building fire or wildfire, your best option for survival is simply to not be there anymore,' he said. 'If it is a building fire, make sure to stay low and move quickly. Smoke will build along the ceiling first with relatively clean air down low which will allow for quick and safe escape. 'As far as wildfires, as soon as you have an evacuation order, it is time to go.' Anthony and his wife, Kaitlin, 35, recently launched a new charity called Stuffie Strong, which brings toys to children who have endured a natural disaster. 'Our goal is to provide kids that have been through various disasters a new stuffed animal to help them get through it,' he explained. 'Often in the aftermath, parents and adults are focused on the necessities, ie. food, clothing, shelter, toiletries, those kinds of things. 'Kids are shunted around without anything to comfort them after having lost everything they've ever known.' In the end, he said he hopes that he can help as many people as he can through both his charity and by sharing his knowledge.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
The big idea: should we embrace boredom?
In 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. The only available diversion was a button that delivered a painful electric shock. Almost half of the participants pressed it. One man pressed the button 190 times – even though he, like everyone else in the study, had earlier indicated that he found the shock unpleasant enough that he would pay to avoid being shocked again. The study's authors concluded that 'people prefer doing to thinking', even if the only thing available to do is painful – perhaps because, if left to their own devices, our minds tend to wander in unwanted directions. Since the mass adoption of smartphones, most people have been walking around with the psychological equivalent of a shock button in their pocket: a device that can neutralise boredom in an instant, even if it's not all that good for us. We often reach for our phones for something to do during moments of quiet or solitude, or to distract us late at night when anxious thoughts creep in. This isn't always a bad thing – too much rumination is unhealthy – but it's worth reflecting on the fact that avoiding unwanted mind-wandering is easier than it's ever been, and that most people distract themselves in very similar, screen-based ways. Smartphones have also increased the pressure to use our time productively, to optimise every minute of our lives. If once a harried commuter might have been forced to stare out of the window or read a book on the train to work, now they may try to catch up on their emails to avoid feeling guilty and inefficient. To sit and do nothing is seen as a waste of time. But that ignores the fact that when we're doing nothing we're often thinking quite hard. What happens to all those difficult or untamed half-thoughts that start to form in the milliseconds before we dig into our pockets and pull out our phones again? Most psychologists studying boredom would agree that, while it can feel unpleasant, it's useful. Like hunger or loneliness, it alerts us to a need, a desire to do something different. According to Erin Westgate, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, we become bored if something fails to absorb our attention, or when we perceive it as meaningless. This is not to say that something needs to be both engaging and meaningful to keep us interested: doing sudoku might be absorbing but relatively meaningless, while reading a Peppa Pig bedtime story for the 500th time is not engaging but may nonetheless feel like a meaningful thing to do. Watching paint dry is both unstimulating and pointless, which is why it isn't a common pastime. In any case, when boredom strikes it should ideally serve as a prompt to do something more engaging or meaningful. If you don't react appropriately to your boredom, or perhaps if engaging or meaningful things aren't available to you for whatever reason, you may find yourself becoming chronically bored. That is associated with a range of problems, including depression, anxiety, poor life satisfaction, lower academic achievement, substance abuse and excessive risk-taking. There is evidence to suggest that chronic boredom is becoming more common, and that this uptick has coincided with the rise of smartphones. In a paper published last year, researchers noted that the proportion of students in China and the US who described themselves as bored steadily increased in the years after 2010, during the first decade of smartphone dominance. Why might digital media have this effect? Research has shown that the main reason we pick up our phones or check our socials is to relieve boredom, but that the behaviour actually exacerbates it. One study, for instance, found that people who were bored at work were more likely to use their smartphones – and subsequently feel even more bored. It may be that checking your phone only addresses part of what you need when you start to feel bored. Digital devices are very good at attracting your attention – in fact, everything you interact with on a screen has been designed to capture, hold and monetise it – but much of what we do online doesn't feel meaningful. It's incredibly easy to plan to look at your phone for just five minutes and resurface two hours later with Mastermind-level knowledge of the latest Blake Lively controversy or your ex's holiday plans. The average American spends more than four hours a day on their smartphone and more than seven hours a day in total online. That adds up to spending 17 years of your adult life browsing the internet. I expect that even the biggest technophiles would agree that this isn't how they want to spend their one precious life. Phones' efficacy at whisking us into superficial stimulation short-circuits our boredom and allows us to swiftly evade messages that we might need to hear, such as 'Why am I feeling this?' or 'What do I need that I'm not getting?' If we pause and listen, then perhaps we can make a choice rather than being manipulated by software engineers. When boredom strikes, we should resist the urge to assuage it instantly and ask ourselves: are we in search of pure entertainment or something more purposeful, an opportunity to connect with friends or our community or something different, something new? The people who choose to embrace boredom, at least for a while, may paradoxically experience less of it. It could even be the first step towards a life that feels more stimulating overall: meaningful, creative and free. Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi (Pan Macmillan, £14.99) Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (Penguin, £10.99) The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman (Vintage, £10.99)
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Man reveals the horrifying - and potentially deadly - impact of going 264 hours without sleeping
A man who stayed awake for a shocking 264 hours has detailed the horrifying toll it took on his body and mind. In 1963, 17-year-old Randy Gardner made a pact to stay up for a record length of time with two friends, in a bid to win first prize at their local annual greater San Diego science fair. The teenagers were aiming to go 260 hours, or just under 11 days, without sleep in order to break the world record—as well as discover what the experiment would do to the human brain. But within just a few days, the endeavour began to yield some concerning results. Now, one of the teens involved in the schoolboy experiment has revealed what really happened during the record-breaking stunt, deemed so dangerous that the Guinness World Records will no longer monitor it. 'For years and years I've just hibernated,' admitted Mr Gardner, now 67, in a video posted to the Guinness World Records YouTube account. 'I don't know why I agreed to talk.' Shortly after Christmas in 1963, Mr Gardner recruited Bruce McAllister, and Joe Marciano Jr. to help keep him awake. After flipping a coin, it was decided that Mr Gardner would be the guinea pig. Following 72 hours of no sleep, Mr Gardner experienced concentration issues and short-term memory loss, as well as bouts of moodiness, paranoia and hallucinations. 'About the forth or fifth day, I was like-are you kidding me, this is hard,' Mr Gardner said. 'By then it had gotten out to the newspapers and the wire services picked it up and it was too late, I couldn't back out. 'So there I was, stuck in this thing. So I thought, let's do it, let's do the 11 days.' In the meantime, a sleep researcher at Stanford University, William Dement, had read about the experiment in the news, and decided to join the boys for the last three days. Later dubbed Dr Sleep and named the father of sleep science, Dr Dement studied Mr Gardner's physical and mental wellbeing, keeping close records of his state. He drove the sleep-deprived 17-year-old around in a convertible, with the radio on full-blast, and challenged him to games of pinball. Miraculously, Mr Gardner actually managed to win the match-despite at that point having gone ten days without rest. 'We did everything. We walked the beaches at all hours. We visited the county jail at three in the morning,' Mr Gardner said. 'You name it, we did it.' His only stimulants during the challenge were Coca Cola, loud music and hot and cold showers. His classmates Mr McCallister and Mr Marciano also administered a set of 20 tests every six hours, to assess his mental state. By the end of the experiment, Mr Gardner was experiencing memory loss, slurred speech and hallucinations. He was also having trouble with his coordination. But the teen prevailed—finally surpassing the 260 hours of sleeplessness previously claimed in 1959 by Honolulu DJ Tom Rounds. Mr Gardner had been awake for 11 days and 25 minutes. Afterwards, he slept for 14 hours and 45 minutes at the Naval Hospital in San Diego, under observation by Dr Dement and his team, who monitored his brain waves, heartrate, temperature, muscle activity and blood pressure. But despite the stunning length of time spent without sleep, the teen was deemed fine—quickly returning to a normal sleep schedule. The record was since broken multiple times until 1997, when Guinness World Records stopped accepting new attempts for safety reasons. At that point, it was held by Robert McDonald, who spent 18 days and 21 hours (453 hours and 40 minutes) awake. Years since the experiment, Mr Gardner has reported suffering from decades of unbearable insomnia—which he blames on his long bout without sleep as a teen. Poor sleep has been linked to a number of health problems, including cancer, stroke and infertility. Experts have long advised that waking up during the night does not necessarily mean you have insomnia, which figures suggest affects up to 14million Brits. Still, sleep deprivation takes its own toll, from irritability and reduced focus in the short term, to an increased risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes. According to the American Sleep Association, nearly 70 million Americans also have a sleep disorder.
