"paghat" wrote in message
news
In article , "Don K"
wrote:

"paghat" wrote in message
news
In article , "Don K"
wrote:
Man-made aluminum & aluminates MIGHT have some involvement in the
development of alzheimers disease, though years back when Science
Digest
did a whole issue about it, looked like only about one out of ten
researchers thought it much likely.

Aluminum is an element and strictly speaking, is not something that
is man-made.

Pure aluminum does not exist in nature, & its existence was not even
known
until 1808, & it was another 80 years before it could be extracted
affordably from boxite & alumina. Boxite is found just about
everywhere in
nature; aluminum per se is not. When metalurgists first learned to
purify
aluminum from boxite, it cost more per ounce than gold. Nowadays it
costs
us here in the Northwest our salmon resources, there being no more
salmon
runs at all in rivers & streams near aluminum plants.

Most mining involves dealing with nasty by-products.

A lot of gold is also obtained by refining ore thru all sorts of
chemical
processes. Yet we don't refer to it as man-made gold. There's no
alchemy involved. It's just recovering the gold that is locked up
in other compounds.

Gold can be toxic to the liver and kidneys. Perhaps a prudent person
should stop wearing man-made gold while avoiding aluminum.

Don

Never heard about gold being toxic -- I guess I better not bury my great
horde of dubloons in the garden -- but I've seen piles of extremely toxic
rubble left over from gold mining.

I still sorta feel there's a difference between gold which DOES exist in a
pure state naturally (in addition to dissolved state in the ocean & finely
powdered in some environments, & aluminum which as an ore is bauxite of
quite a different character altogether. If pure god did NOT exist in
nature until purified by human hands, I would regard it as man-made, yes,
just as the transuranic elements can mainly only be brought about by the
activity of scientists. But anyway, my only point was that the aluminum
deposits in alzheimer-sufferers' brains is the stuff people purify, rather
than resembling the ore that exists in dusty aspect in everyone's gardens.
So either the brain's electrical charges must manufacturer it from the
environment, or what SEEMS more likely, our daily exposure to created
aluminum is making some of us stupider than we used to be. Here's a web
article about the bits I worry about (from a school of biology p.o.v.
rather than my ecology worry-wart p.o.v.):
http://student.biology.arizona.edu/ad/bbb.html


By your reckoning practically all metals are man-made, as is concrete. I
find it hard to think of anything other than wood which would by your
standards be "natutal"

Franz Heymann