Welcome to the Kotkeye Ride Home for Thursday, April 29th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird.

People who accidentally became memes are using NFTs to regain a sense of ownership over their likenesses and make some pretty nice chunks of change.

Scotland could become the first rewilding nation, and another shortage report, this time

computer chips. Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

Imagine if a candid photo your parents took of you as a toddler could end up making you half a million dollars 15 years later.

That is what happened to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student Zoe Roth, but you may know her better as disaster girl.

She's the little kid in that ubiquitous photo looking slyly at the camera while a house burns down in the background. By the way, in case you

have any concerns over that photo, it turns out the house was a planned, controlled fire executed

by the fire department. The whole neighborhood turned out to watch,

including Roth and her father, who had recently bought a new digital camera, and well, the rest is history. Roth is just the latest in a string of people who accidentally became memes,

intentionally cashing in by selling their original memes as NFTs. NFTs are interesting from an artistic perspective because of how their authenticity and ownership

is marked in the blockchain and also enables the creator to be paid a cut anytime the

NFT gets sold.

Unfortunately, NFTs also appear to be pretty awful for the environment.

Here's how the verge explains it. NFTs are largely bought be pretty awful for the environment. Here's how the Verge explains it.

NFTs are largely bought and sold in places like nifty gateway and super rare that use the

cryptocurrency Ethereum.

Ethereum, like most major cryptocurrencies, is built on a system called proof of work that

is incredibly energy-hungry.

There's a fee associated with making a

transaction on Ethereum, and ironically, that fee is called gas. Proof of work acts as a sort of

security system for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin, since there's no third party like a

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