Your Street May Literally Be Paved With Gold (and Other Precious Metals)

There will always be people who canvas the city for scrap metal. Like whoever stole that entire bridge in western Pennsylvania a couple years back, or lifted the bronze grave markers and pieces of lead roof and metallic flush valves on public toilets that have gone missing in recent years.

But it's a bit of a twist to learn that many would-be urban prospectors hold PhDs, as Kate Ravilious reports in a recent issue of New Scientist (subscription only). Ravilious writes of an emerging academic interest in mining the many layers of city infrastructure for precious metals and other materials. An inaugural three-day Symposium on Urban Mining was even held in Europe last year.