The Elements of Innovation Discovered
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While the recent call from conservationists and sportsmen for the Trump administration to block permits has cast a shadow of doubt on the development of a mine at Pebble, there is no denying the controversial Alaska project encompasses a world-class store of precious, industrial and critical minerals. A recent recalculation of the Pebble resource shows the deposit hosts roughly a third of the world's known rhenium, an extremely rare metal that lends its exceptional heat...
Group 11 Technologies Inc. believes that GFG Resources Inc.'s Rattlesnake Hills project about 60 miles southwest of Casper, Wyoming is the ideal place to prove the viability of its proprietary means of recovering gold from the earth without mining. This technique, known as in-situ recovery, is a non-invasive method that involves circulating fluids underground that dissolve the sought metals and then pumping the fluids back to the surface to extract the metals – reverse of the...
Two metals, nickel and titanium, come together in a unique alloy that is gaining popularity in new applications, including in outer space. Known as "nitinol," this high-demand metal is prized for its ability to snap back to a heat-trained shape after being pulled, twisted or deformed. Accidentally discovered by metallurgist William Buehler at the Navy Ordinance Laboratories in 1959, nitinol has been used in increasingly sophisticated applications over the years, finding...
Blue Star Gold Corp. is among the latest in a rapidly growing list of mineral exploration companies leveraging the machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities offered by GoldSpot Discoveries Corp. As the largest stakeholder along the High Lake Greenstone belt in Nunavut, Canada, Blue Star's Ulu, Hood River and Roma projects cover more than 40 high-grade gold occurrences over a 50-kilometer (31 mile) strike, with a majority of the two former projects being...
GoldSpot Discoveries Corp. Sept. 7 announced the results of its property-wide comprehensive data review, compilation, and target generation on Critical Elements Lithium Corp.s' New Blocks 1-6 and 7 claims within the prolific Nemiscau greenstone belt in James Bay, Quebec. Aspiring to be a large-scale, responsible supplier of lithium to the burgeoning EV and energy storage systems industries, Critical Elements Lithium is advancing its wholly-owned, high-purity Rose...
With a little bit of gold, scientists at Pennsylvania State University have taken another step toward the vision of turning windows into transparent solar cells that generate electricity while still offering a view of the world outside. "Transparent solar cells could someday find a place on windows in homes and office buildings, generating electricity from sunlight that would otherwise be wasted," said Kai Wang, assistant research professor of materials science and...
Roughly 200 times stronger than steel, highly conductive to electricity and heat, antibacterial, and only one atom thick, graphene is a wonder material that has captured the imagination of scientists. Now, researchers in Germany and Finland have created a new two-dimensional carbon material that offers new properties and possibilities. In recent years, graphene has been used to make materials lighter and stronger, batteries charge faster and last longer, and even as a coating...
The formation of bonanza-grade gold veins like those running through the ore at Pretium Resources Inc.'s Brucejack Mine in Northern British Columbia, Canada, has long baffled scientists. Given the time it would take the mineralizing fluids carrying minute concentrations of gold to form the thick veins of the precious metal, they simply should not exist. Yet, these seemingly impossible ultrahigh-grade seams of gold are found at places like Brucejack, Ballarat in Australia,...
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley reported April 17 the discovery of a method for simplifying the removal of toxic metals such as mercury and boron to produce clean water, while at the same time potentially capturing valuable metals, such as gold. The research targets improvements in treatments currently applied either before or after desalination – the removal of salt – in the process of producing drinkable water, or water for agriculture or industry, fro...
Recovering scandium from its iron-titanium mine in Quebec, tellurium from the Kennecott copper mine in Utah, and now lithium from its Boron mine in California, Rio Tinto is leveraging its operations to produce the critical metals needed for 3D printing, solar energy, and lithium batteries. On April 7, the global miner announced that it has begun producing battery-grade lithium from waste rock at its Boron mine site at the western edge of the Mojave Desert. The mine is...
X-MAT recently announced a collaboration with the Battery Innovation Center, to determine further improvements of X-MAT's electrode fabrication technology, which dramatically increases the storage capacity of graphite recovered from recycled batteries With lithium-ion battery markets projected to increase by 25% annually, resulting in 14-fold growth by 2030, X-MAT has long prepared for the necessity of battery recycling and has sought to further refine its X-BATT technology....
Drifting some 250 miles above the Earth, researchers aboard the International Space Station have enlisted the help from some of the smallest miners in the universe, microbes. These off-world experiments tested the possibility of using these tiny organisms to convert unsuitable space rock and regolith into soil for growing plants and food, as well as extracting valuable minerals and metals from extraterrestrial materials. Published in Nature Communications, the findings by a...
Exploits Discovery Corp. is the latest in a rapidly growing group of mineral exploration companies to use GoldSpot Discoveries Corp.'s machine learning technology and geoscience expertise to help refine drill targets on its property. With four Newfoundland gold projects geologically, geochemically, and structurally similar to New Found Gold Corp.'s Queensway project, Exploits is familiar with GoldSpot's artificial intelligence exploration expertise. Earlier this year, New...
Europe takes a different approach to education by developing a video game modification for one of the world's most popular games, Minecraft. With an increasing population requiring larger infrastructure and new technologies demanding larger quantities of a wider array of minerals, our society is increasingly reliant on minerals and metals. All these materials have one thing in common – geology. To help raise awareness about these needed raw materials and geology, B...
While rising gold prices are dominating the headlines, silver is quietly experiencing its own explosion in demand. The growing appetite for the lustrous, white metal stems in part from its use in components needed in rapidly evolving technologies, led by the voracious appetite of fifth generation (5G) telecommunications and related electronic applications and systems. But silver, long valued for its beauty and rarity, has been around for millennia. Other than in currency and a...
What if a mining company could find out how much gold is in a sample by simply crushing it, putting it in a jar and zapping it with x-ray? Chrysos Corp.'s PhotonAssay is able to do just that. Hitting samples with high-energy X-rays, Chrysos PhotonAssay causes excitation of atomic nuclei allowing enhanced analysis of gold, silver, and complementary elements in as little as two minutes. This provides the ability to carry out mine site and laboratory assays without the need for...
GoldSpot Discoveries Corp. Aug. 11 said it has been hired to apply its artificial intelligence driven mineral exploration expertise to identify new targets on AEX Gold Inc.'s large portfolio of high-grade gold properties in southern Greenland. "We are delighted to be partnering with GoldSpot in this venture, a company with a stellar reputation and a wealth of experience in helping mining companies identify new exploration targets," said AEX Gold Executive Vice President and...
Roughly 38,000 metric tons of rare earth concentrates were produced from American soil during 2020, yet the United States remains 100% reliant on foreign countries for its supply of these 17 elements critical to our modern high-tech society – an apparent paradox that speaks to the complexities of these enigmatic metals. The irony of rare earth elements (REEs) begins with their name, which is at the same time a misnomer and accurate descriptor. "All the REEs except p...
The global transition to electric vehicles plugged into renewable energy sources is powering enormous demand for graphite, the single largest ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. "Graphite demand increases in both absolute and percentage terms since graphite is needed to build the anodes found in the most commonly deployed automotive, grid, and decentralized batteries," the World Bank penned in a 2020 report, "The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition." According...
One year after unveiling a graphene-based coating that is 99% effective at killing the virus responsible for COVID-19 when applied to face masks and other personal protective equipment, ZEN Graphene Solutions Ltd. has received Health Canada approval of its ZENGuard disposable face mask treated with this pathogen-fighting coating. "Exactly one year ago today we announced the scientific breakthrough related to our antimicrobial coating – and now seeing proactive affirmation f...
From the advancements of technology during the Bronze Age to the computers and telecommunication systems of today's Big Data Era, tin has been critical to human progress for at least 5,500 years. Sometime around 3500 BC, Sumerians living in modern day Turkey and Iran discovered that mixing a little tin with copper created bronze, an alloy that produced much more durable weapons and tools than those cast from copper alone. This cutting-edge discovery offered a strategic and...
From electric vehicles plugged into renewable energy to smartphones connected to 5G networks, new technologies take advantage of the special properties of a suite of critical minerals and metals that are often rare and in short supply. In addition to the rare earths, cobalt, lithium, and other technology metals that capture headline attention, this list includes even more obscure mined materials such as gallium, germanium, scandium, and tellurium. While scarce, these critical...
From jewelry at a black-tie soiree to scrubbing harmful emissions from the exhaust system of a farm truck, the six platinum group metals – platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium – are metals that are both precious and critical to the United States and Canada. Extremely rare, durable, and with a brilliance that does not tarnish, platinum and other metals in its group are a treasured choice for high-end jewelry that stands the test of time. Three of the...
An unsung war hero that saved countless American troops during World War II, an overlooked battery material that has played a pivotal role in storing electricity for more than 100 years, and a major ingredient in futuristic grid-scale energy storage, antimony is among the most important critical metalloids that most people have never heard of. While antimony may not be part of the common lexicon, humans have been using this semi-metal for more than 5,000 years. "For example,...
In recent years, Teck Resources Ltd. has been working with healthcare officials around the world to bring copper to the frontlines in the urgent fight against bacteria and viruses harmful to the human body. Now Teck, one of the world's top copper producers, has joined the battle underway to curb the spread of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic by moving outside the healthcare field with a new pilot project in Vancouver that is using the red metal's formidable antimicrobial...