The hottest dig on earth is taking place in the Athabasca tar sands, with 57 projects in the works.

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As astrobiologists dig and scrape in amongst the microbial inhabitants of Earth's most hostile environments to understand the possibility of life elsewhere, they learn things that have economic uses.

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Whether it's fire walking or knowing that the Earth is round, everyone seems to dig counterintuitive thinking.

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The same chubby little baby hare was burrowing in the earth with his paws, trying to dig up some rootlets or a cabbage leaf that had been dropped on the ground last year.

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Nor were we to dig on our dig, only to skim away fine layers of earth with a scalpel, lowering the surface of our metre over the course of days, until the objects embedded there projectile points or pottery shards rested on top.

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But if you really want to dig behind the headlines (about things like stellar IPOs, trade issues, COP16, territorial disputes, rare earth metals, even Shanghai test scores), you need to take a quick look more on that later at what may well be the definitive guide to China, or at least the most up-to-date.

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