The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Sorted by date Results 576 - 600 of 664
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...
Appia Energy Corp.'s Alces Lake project in Saskatchewan hosts some of the highest rare earth element grades ever discovered and the Toronto-based exploration company is now investigating just how large this potentially world-class rare earths deposit is. While a resource has yet to be calculated for the high-grade zones discovered in recent years at Alces Lake, drill intercepts of 15.6 meters averaging 16.1% total rare earth oxides and 2.7 meters of 31% TREO indicate the proje...
President Donald Trump has declared America's heavy reliance on adversarial nations for critical minerals a national emergency that threatens the security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. The President made this emergency declaration in the Sept. 30 "Executive order on addressing the threat to the domestic supply chain from reliance on critical minerals from foreign adversaries." Trump says, "a strong America cannot be dependent on imports from foreign advers...
Seeking to alleviate the United States' heavy reliance on China for its supply of the rare earth elements needed for a broad range of high-tech applications, Ucore Rare Metals Inc. has rolled out a strategy to begin producing REEs in Alaska in three years. Dubbed Alaska2023, this business plan aims to build the Alaska Strategic Metals Complex, a commercial-scale RapidSX rare earths separation and purification plant in Southeast Alaska, by 2023. This processing facility is the...
Just a week after Tesla Battery Day 2020, where CEO Elon Musk unveiled the electric automaker's massive lithium-ion battery ambitions, the iconic electric automaker has cut a deal to buy some of the lithium it will require for this plan from a mine in North Carolina and has begun moving ahead with a Texas refinery to transform the raw lithium concentrates into the form needed for its batteries. These two moves will shorten Tesla's North American mines-to-electric vehicle...
Scientists in Italy, United Kingdom, Canada, and now Hong Kong are researching graphene-enhanced masks ability to kill viruses and bacteria, further increasing the face covering's effectiveness in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and other disease. While face masks made from cloth and other materials provide varying levels of protection against the direct transmission of COVID-19, the virus can live on the surface of most mask materials for up to several days. This poses a ri...
Tesla Inc. has joined a growing effort to address artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not by boycotting this much maligned source of the lithium-ion battery metal but by investing in it. The iconic electric automaker has joined the Fair Cobalt Alliance, an organization with a vision of making the small but often dangerous cobalt mines in DRC a better place to work for men and women who have few other livelihood options. Artisanal mining in DRC has...
Nobel Prize winning co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery John Goodenough is teaming up with a new generation of scientists and entrepreneurs at Energy Exploration Technologies, or EnergyX, to make the next world changing battery storage discovery – solid-state lithium-ion batteries. From untethering our phones, computers, and power tools, to ushering in the era of renewable energy and electric vehicles, the rechargeable batteries pioneered by Goodenough and his colleagues h...
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...
Tesla wants low-carbon nickel from a future mine at Giga Metals' Turnagain nickel-cobalt deposit in northern British Columbia, Canada, according to Reuters. Citing three unnamed sources, the global news agency said Tesla is in discussion with the Canadian miner to advance development of a mine that would produce nickel and cobalt, both vital ingredients in the lithium-ion batteries that power its electric vehicles. These reports have not been confirmed by either company....
The European Union is taking action to ensure it has the critical minerals and metals needed for the coming "transition towards a green and digital economy" over the coming decades. "A secure and sustainable supply of raw materials is a prerequisite for a resilient economy," said European Commission Vice President for Interinstitutional Relations and Foresight Maroš Šefčovič. Since 2011, the European Commission has been assembling a list of raw materials, predominately min...
The ability to charge an electric vehicle in just 15 seconds would wipe out many of the barriers to EV ownership – slow charging times, battery degradation, and range anxiety. Skeleton Technologies, a global leader in graphene-based ultracapacitor energy storage, believes it is on the verge of such an ultra-fast charging battery breakthrough and has partnered with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to complete the development of SuperBattery, a graphene b...
A pair of Texas congressmen, Republican Lance Gooden and Democrat Vicente Gonzalez, have introduced the Reclaiming American Rare Earths Act, bipartisan legislation aimed at reducing America's dependence on China for rare earth elements and other critical minerals. The United States depends on foreign countries for more than 50% of its supply of 31 of the 35 minerals considered critical to the nation's economic wellbeing and national security, including 100% import-reliant for...
Researchers in a Swiss laboratory have developed a membrane made of titanium oxide nanowires with antibacterial and antiviral properties. The membrane, which resembles filter paper, may be used in the fight to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic more effectively than paper masks, which are increasingly becoming made mandatory, according to scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland. While the relative effectiveness of paper masks is no longer in...
U.S. Vanadium Holding Company LLC, an Arkansas-based producer of high-purity vanadium pentoxide, is urging the United States government to take steps to bolster domestic production of vanadium. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, roughly 94% of the titanium used in the U.S. last year went into stronger, lighter, and more durable steels and other alloys. Vanadium-alloyed steels are used in virtually every high-strength structural steel application in military equipment,...
Florida-based Semplastics and its advanced materials division X-MAT dreams of building safer and more durable homes from the waste left behind by coal mining. "'One person's trash is another person's treasure' is a saying our team has taken to heart," said Bill Easter, founder of Semplastics. "We're working to create a circular economy where we take coal waste materials and turn them into something remarkable. We're already seeing great progress with prototypes." Semplastics'...
Rare earths and battery metals market expert Adamas Intelligence forecasts that demand for the magnet rare earths – neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium – will falter slightly this year due to COVID-19 before rising sharply over the balance of the decade. Electric vehicles, wind power generators, consumer appliances, cordless power tools, speakers and dozens of other modern devices benefit from the unmatched power and durability of rare earth magnets. A lessened demand for...
It is estimated that upwards of US$13.8 billion of rare earth magnets are imported into the United States each year, which is creating a stockpile of some of the most widely used rare earth elements. These powerful REE magnets are used in a wide variety of applications – high-performance motors in electric vehicles, wind turbines and generators, medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and high-fidelity speakers to name a few. Canada-based Geomega Resources Inc. has d...
An easily administered COVID-19 test that delivers accurate results nearly instantaneously would be a game-changing technology that could slow the spread of the virus as governments look to re-open economies. One Canada-based technology company says it has developed such a test, thanks to the special properties of graphene. Consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arrange in a hexagonal lattice, graphene is a two-dimensional material that is highly conductive with other...
While debate rages over whether lithium-ion and vanadium reflow energy storage systems will usher in the next wave of power generation, another technology, batteries that store energy using zinc, is moving into the market. Zinc batteries, especially the technology being marketed by Vancouver, British Columbia-based Zinc8 Energy Solutions, has attracted considerable attention in recent weeks with a new type of viable, lower-cost energy storage option for many large customers...
An international research team from Europe, taking inspiration from nature, have devised a new aluminum-based material that turns the force of a cutting tool back onto itself. This new lightweight material - named Proteus, after the shape-changing god in mythology - is made of ceramic spheres encased in a cellular aluminum structure, that in tests could not be cut by angle grinders, drills and even high-pressure water jets. The research team, led by Durham University in the...
GrapheneCA is looking for entrepreneurs who want to get into the business of painting high-risk public surfaces with the New York-based company's tested and certified antibacterial and antiviral coatings. Graphene, a material made from a single layer of carbon atoms linked in a hexagonal pattern, has been hailed as miracle material for its immense strength and high conductivity. This 2D material has also been proven to upset the function of the membranes of bacteria and...
Italy-based Directa Plus says the coronavirus killing properties of its graphene-enhanced COVID-19 masks have been confirmed by scientists in Rome. Already independently certified as antiviral by ISO, an international standard-setting organization based in Switzerland, a mask with the company's Graphene Plus, or G+, antiviral graphene has been on sale since June. "Most of the other masks are currently not able to inactivate the virus but they are able to just decrease the...
Will gigamines be added to the front of the Tesla supply chain? While Elon Musk's offer of a "giant contract" to mining companies able to supply nickel suggests the Tesla CEO would rather not start his own mining division, subtle clues indicate that he is willing to, if needed. Musk says any bottlenecks along the entire lithium-ion battery supply chain, from mining and refining the metals that go into the batteries powering its EVs and renewable energy storage products to the...
From mines to gigafactories, it is going to take a massive and coordinated effort to scale up the entire North American lithium-ion battery supply chain at a pace that meets the growing demands of the accelerating electric vehicle revolution. "To replace more of the gasoline cars that are on the road, to benefit from the promise of electrification across all vehicle types and all consumer classes, requires the supply chain to be built out in a bigger way and faster way than...
