Those fossil fuels have built our civilization.

You see, fire made us human fossil fuels made us modern.

It's a type of fossilized dental plaque that is called officially dental calculus.

In that case, Raúl may seek to cling grimly to the fossilized system that he helped build and maintain with such brutality.

And switching from the old fire to the new fire means changing two big stories about oil and electricity, each of which puts two fifths of the fossil carbon in the air.

The social benefits of Myriad s slightly earlier discovery have been dwarfed by the costs that its callous pursuit of profit has imposed.

But did these policy changes come too late? The ossified, corrupt, inefficient economy built in the fat years of the oil boom may be impossible to save.

Just as a ruthless Prime Minister Chirac sold a nuclear reactor to Saddam Hussein in the 1970 s, so the President Chirac of today is being lured into doing big business with another aggressive dictatorship.

Imagine what we could learn about diseases by studying the history of human disease, from ancient hominids to the present. But how? TED Fellow Christina Warinner is an achaeological geneticist, and she's found a spectacular new tool the microbial DNA in fossilized dental plaque.

Handles were once made of elephant ivory, but this has been discontinued, though fossil ivory, such as mammoth, is still sometimes used, and antique razors with ivory scales are occasionally found (it is illegal to kill elephants for their ivory, but it is legal to buy an ivory handled razor made before 1989).