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Veritasium
The asbestos problem is worse than we thought
Asbestos is a rock you can weave, and that single uncanny property is the whole story. Veritasium opens with researchers crawling over bright blue mineral outside Las Vegas, picking up something that looks like fluffy cotton but will not burn, then widens out into a 55 minute investigation of how a naturally fireproof mineral became the most useful and the most lethal building material of the twentieth century. The video does three things at once. It explains the chemistry, why a silica tetrahedron makes a rock and why a tiny mismatch between two mineral layers makes that rock curl into weavable fibers.