The Barcelona-based international conservation agency publishes its Sampled Red List Index to give a quick representation of trends in the natural selection market (graphic from New Scientist). Only 2.5 percent of all known plants and animals have been documented, and while that number might be a bit misleading, the process for seeing exactly which species were in danger was a cumbersome one. IUCN uses random samplings of 1500 species to assess larger risk. While cruder, such estimates can give a quick idea of the threat level before it's too late.

As you can see, the danger is most pressing in the mammalian sector. Although humpback whales are swimming back from extinction, many precious mammalian species are at risk. Marine mammals are the usual target, specifically those in northern oceans, according to an article that appeared in Science.

Viewing animals like shares reveals vanishing species [New Scientist]

Some investors are selling off their stock and buying up vintage comic books, believing that the timelessness of comics offers a more secure long-term investment than stocks have of late:

Mark Craddock, manager of Comic Book World, in Florence, Ky., says stock-market investors also are turning to superheroes. "There's kind of a buying frenzy" in vintage comic books, he says.

The "Silver Age Comic Book Pricing Index" of 32 frequently traded '60s comics, was up 14.2% in the 18 months ending in July, while the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index was down 11% in the same period. Mark Haspel, president of Certified Guaranty Co. in Sarasota, Fla., which grades comic books, often for investors, says it's on track to handle 200,000 books this year, up from 150,000 in 2007.

"Spider-Man is going to be here in 20 years — he's not going away," Mr. Haspel says.

This isn’t the first time comics have been suggested as a wise investment. Last year, Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute noted that the returns on comic books beat out those of most other collectibles, including art and antiques.

When Stocks Tank, Some Investors Stampede to Alpacas and Turn to Drink [Wall Street Journal] (Via)

Here you can see the same NYSE building, with its characteristic circular meeting areas, on a crowded day. Over the years, those circular trading areas have retained their shape, but become encrusted with monitors and computer terminals.

Though there is a great deal of debate over what the exact forces were that caused the Great Depression, many facts are clear. On so-called Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, the news reported that the Dow Jones had plummeted 17% over the last month. Panicked, investors started bailing out of the market and traded a whopping 12.9 million shares that day, causing an even greater financial panic. The following week, on Monday and Tuesday, the market fell even further. 16.4 million shares were traded Tuesday, and by the end of that day the market had lost $14 billion in value. The week the stock market crashed, it is estimated that the market lost $30 billion in value, which was more than the U.S. spent in World War I. Like this week's stock crash, the 1929 crash was caused by panicked trading in response to bad news about the market.

While we can't say what exactly the future may hold for the market, and the global economy, history suggests that we're in for a long, slow recovery. The Great Depression lasted decades, and the market didn't reach its pre-Depression levels until the early 1950s. And yet the weird, selfish hopefulness of the stock market never dies. Here you can see a picture of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, currently being built by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in China. This building, with its odd floating base, is a kind of parody of stock markets. Say the architects:

For millennia, the solid building stands on a solid base . . . Typically, the base anchors a structure and connects it emphatically to the ground.The essence of the stock market is speculation: it is based on capital, not gravity . . . [This suggests] an architectural invention: our project is a building with a floating base. As if it is lifted by the same speculative euphoria that drives the market, the former base has crept up the tower to become a floating platform.

As a great philosopher once said of capitalism: "All that is solid melts into air." That sounds beautiful until the solid thing turns out to be your house.

Image of contemporary NYSE via STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images; image of Shenzhen stock exchange via OMA.