Slicing open one of these trees or running the leaves of its bush cousin through a peanut press produces a sap that oozes a neon blue-green. This "juice" is actually one-quarter nickel, far more concentrated than the ore feeding the world's nickel smelters.
[...] This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants?