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China produces the entire world’s supply of samarium, a rare earth metal that the United States and its allies need to rebuild inventories of fighter jets, missiles and other hardware.China’s strict controls on the export of heat-resistant magnets made with rare earth minerals have exposed a major vulnerability in the U.S. military supply chain.Without these magnets, the United States and its allies in Europe will struggle to refill recently depleted inventories of military hardware.For more than a decade, the United States has failed to develop an alternative to China’s supply of a specific kind of rare earth crucial for the...

Researchers at Germany’s TU Dortmund University report that they have developed an ultra-robust time crystal. Their study, published in Nature Physics, offers new insights into the potential applications and the physics governing time crystals, and offers a new method for keeping them stable. Time crystals represent a new phase of matter, first theorized in 2012 by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. Unlike traditional crystals, which exhibit repeating patterns in space, time crystals display patterns that repeat in time. This means their atomic structures undergo periodic motion even without external energy, defying the traditional laws of thermodynamics that govern equilibrium in most...

In a press announcement issued by the Studio ESSECI press office, authorities have discovered lost pieces of the Golden Tree of Lucignano, a grandiose reliquary created by the famous Sienese goldsmith, Gabriello d'Antonio.The reliquary is considered one of the finest masterpieces of Italian goldsmithing, which is a morphological tripartition (roots, trunk, foliage) and contains the metaphor of the life of Christ in the three different phases: origin, passion, and glory.Measuring 2.70 metres in height, it was created in two stages between 1350 and 1471 from gilded copper, silver and enamel, and features branches decorated with coral, crystals and miniatures on...

In a new study, researchers analyzed some of the tiny fragments of space rock that were left behind after the meteor exploded, known as meteorite dust. Normally, meteors produce a small amount of dust as they burn up, but the tiny grains are lost to scientists because they are either too small to find, scattered by the wind, fall into water or are contaminated by the environment. However, after the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded, a massive plume of dust hung in the atmosphere for more than four days before eventually raining down on Earth's surface, according to NASA. And luckily, layers...

Eureka! A research team featuring dozens of scientists working in partnership with Google‘s quantum computing labs may have created the world’s first time crystal inside a quantum computer. This is the kind of news that makes me want to jump up and do a happy dance. These scientists may have produced an entirely new phase of matter. I’m going to do my best to explain what that means and why I personally believe this is the most important scientific breakthrough in our lifetimes. However, for the sake of clarity, there’s two points I need to make first: 1. Time crystals...

Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual adviser Marianne Williamson will participate in the next Democrat debate round after meeting the threshold for support. Williamson made it while New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has still not qualified, according to the New York Times. Marianne Williamson is a proponent of “black magic” who said that politics is really a “psychic battle,” as I reported. Williamson said that the Left’s political battle is “black magic.” Trending: SLAVE REGISTERS FROM LONDON Name The Slaves Kamala Harris’ Ancestor Owned Williamson, who reportedly serves as Oprah Winfrey’s “spiritual advisor,” made the witchcraft-themed tweet on January 31, 2017....

Physicists from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary have determined that the sunstones claimed to be used by Vikings to navigate on foggy and cloudy days could provide accurate results. Vikings living between 900 and 1200AD did not have magnetic compasses, and their ability to navigate was attributed in part to the use of calcite, cordierite or tourmaline crystals which functioned as linear polarizers to help them determine geographic north. The crystals can split sunlight into two beams, and when the crystal is turned, splitting the two beams at the same brightness, a navigator could see the polarized rings around the...

Scientists have extracted long-dormant microbes from inside the famous giant crystals of the Naica mountain caves in Mexico - and revived them. The organisms were likely to have been encased in the striking shafts of gypsum at least 10,000 years ago, and possibly up to 50,000 years ago. It is another demonstration of the ability of life to adapt and cope in the most hostile of environments. "Other people have made longer-term claims for the antiquity of organisms that were still alive, but in this case these organisms are all very extraordinary - they are not very closely related to...

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

Crystal Cave of Giants Naica, Mexico - Sept 3 - 6, 2009 Air Temperature of 50C(122F) + Relative Humidity of over 90% = Humidex Value of 105C (228F) !! This is one of the most extreme places on the planet. The Crystal Cave of Giants was accidentally discovered in 2000 by miners working in the silver and lead mine at Naica, Mexico. It lies almost 300 meters (900 feet) below the surface of the Earth and it contains the largest crystals known in the world, by far. The largest crystals are over 11 meters long (36 feet) and weigh 55...

Halemaumau emissions plume, half-size (click for full size): Wheeler Geologic Area, Colorado -- love the hoodoos. Apparently this place is so hard to reach that there was an attempt to make it a national monument, but that attempt collapsed because of lack of interest and potential visitorship, so it's a geological area in a national forest. Wheeler Geologic Area Crystal Cave of Giants, Mexico: Giant Crystal Cave's Mystery Solved (this article has a link to a different cave discovery, a very nice limestone cave in Sequoia National Park). It's pretty amazing that places like these are still being discovered in...

Rare green crystals found in 2,500-year-old tomb (Xinhua) Updated: 2007-07-04 16:43 JING'AN -- Chinese archaeologists exploring a 2,500-year-old tomb in east China's Jiangxi province that contained 47 coffins in a remarkable state of preservation were stunned to discover several pieces of green crystal lodged in the bones of the skeletons in the coffins. One of the diamond-shaped crystals was 8.5 centimeters long. The coffins also contained bronze, gold, silk, porcelain and jade items and even body tissue. Archaeologists said the crystals appeared to have "grown" in the bones. They pointed out that the coffins were made from halved nanmu, a...

How Vikings Might Have Navigated on Cloudy Days By Corey Binns Special to LiveScience posted: 02 March 2007 08:33 am ET Vikings navigated the oceans with sundials aboard their Norse ships. But on an overcast day, sundials would have been useless. Many researchers have suggested that the on foggy days, Vikings looked toward the sky through rock crystals called sunstones to give them direction. No one had tested the theory until recently. A team sailed the Arctic Ocean aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden and found that sunstones could indeed light the way in foggy and cloudy conditions. Would have...

Thunder eggs are spherical objects which form in some types of silica-rich volcanic rocks (e.g. rhyolites). As the volcanic lava cooled, trapped steam and other gases formed an expanding bubble. Silica and feldspar minerals often crystallise around the bubble or grow crystal fibres which radiate outwards from the its centre. These mineral-filled bubbles with a radiating structure are called spherulites. Internal gas pressure forces the spherulite apart to form a central hollow, later filled with more minerals. Adjacent wedge-shaped segments of the cracked and expanding spherule move outwards and away from each other, helping form the typical star-shaped interior. Silica...

I've been meaning to do this for a long time. Below is a fine specimen of banded tourmaline. Tourmalines like this are generated in pegmatites; see diagram below the picture, with description and link to more information. (The diagram is not from the same place as the description.) The Pegmatite Zone, from whence cometh this text: "A pegmatite is a coarse grained igneous rock (formed deep within the earth) having a grain size of 3cm or more. Mostly pegmatites are granitic in origin, that is they are composed of granite and its constituents like quartz, feldspar and mica. In addition...

While public officials, schools, and the ACLU worked overtime this year to ban every vestige of Christmas from the public square, the recently invented holiday known as Kwanzaa is gaining in popularity among black Americans. These occurrences are not unrelated. In an earlier time, blacks held a strong faith in God. But over the past 40 years, the black community has largely let God slip away. Sure the community has maintained the outer trappings of religion, but the solid morality at its core is nearly gone. Enter a God-hating black racist named Ron Karenga. Born Ron Everett on a poultry farm...

Link post, to alert interested Free Republic readers the chance to access the thread in the "Chat" section, where any commentary should be posted: Geology Picture of the Week, October 17-23, 2004: Etna Otherworldly, plus Epidote

First of all, one might think I'm Etna-obsessed. Not true; I posted some images of the Piton de la Fournaise effusive eruption before this. But the Etna pictures continue to be interesting, so why not? This one, primarily due to the cold lava spires in the background, looked like a science-fiction movie set (shrunk for display, click to see the full-size image): And now for something completely different; here's an article I happened to read in the doctor's office. I couldn't find the image accompanying the article, so I found a different image of an epidote crystal. The article was...

Link post, providing a link to the thread in the FR "chat" section, where any discussion and comments should be posted: Geology Pictures of the Week(s), April 11-24, 2004: Microgeology

Worth repeating. Although I'm sure you're all too narrow-minded and angry to consider words like these. But... Please remove the word "Free" from your name. You poor folks don't have a clue. Have everyone read the Constitution again... carefully and, perhaps, sober this time. Sad and pathetic.. an wholly UN-American Signed David (Who loves truly American ideals)