Maja-English

 Indonesian men, women and even children risk their health wearing metalic paint to earn money beacuse of the financial problems caused by the coronavirus. They stop traffic and make little performances to earn money, but the paint that they cover themselves in causes iritation on e.g. their eyes, skin etc. The pandemic really afected them in a finantial way, some of them can't earn enough money to provide food for their families which is why they are franticly trying different ways to earn some money.  I think that it is just an example of how the coronavirus and the whole pandemic affects people. It has a big economic impact in the whole world but mostly in the more poor parts of the world. In march 2020 about 1.63 milion indonesians fell into poverty beacuse of it. The people doing this said that they are aware of the risks of covering themselves in the paint but they say that they think that there is no other choice which i think is really sad. source: https://www.theguard...

 On the island of New Caledonia in the south pacific there has been made an interesting discovery. The discovery is a tree called  Pycnandra acuminata which bleeds a bright blue-green substance when cut. The substance contains up to 25% nickel which is very poisonous to most plants in actually really small amounts. If these kind of metal-containing plants are dried and burned to ash they give a high-grade metal ore, which uses much less energy than needed in standard mining and produces far less pollution.  It's not very likely for it to fully replace conventional mining but it could help clean up soils poluted with toxic metals, and I think taht this little dicovery is really interesting because we don't really know why some plants feed on such metals and don't kill themselves with it. It is thought that they probably use it as a way to protect themselves against insects and fungal infections. In my opinion it would be great if we could use this ability for a good c...