Numlock Sunday: Joshua Sukol on conflict amber

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Joshua Sukol who wrote “Troubled Treasure” in Science. Here's what I wrote about it:

Burmese amber is the best look at the cretaceous period we’ve got. There are loads of species from the times of the dinosaurs locked eternally into sap that became rock over eons, and the scientific impact of that amber making its way into China and into the hands of paleontologists is remarkable: in 2018, scientists reported 321 new species preserved in Burmese amber, making the total number of species discovered in the rock 1,195. However, you can’t really think of a “conflict mineral” worse than it: the Tanai region where it’s mined in dangerous conditions and environmentally awful processes is also where two armies have been fighting to maintain control and usi…