Rare Earths

Bio-accumulation is a pretty hot topic, especially in trying to clean up heavy metal contamination. I haven't heard much lately about de-salinization of soils, but that sounded interesting too.

China is 95% of the rare earth supply these days--processing is hard and dirty. Turns out they have some other ideas about that: a kind of fern accumulates some of the lighter rare earths; up to 1/1000 of the dry leaf weight. It isn't fast, but it doesn't require a lot of energy beyond grinding up the ore and spreading it around. If the pathway can be bred to be more efficient that could cut out some of the work involved.