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University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have discovered a surprising “shape-changing” liquid that seems to bend the laws of thermodynamics. The strange compound—made of oil, water, and magnetic nickel particles—was first assembled by a graduate student who was merely curious to see what might happen. To his surprise, when the liquid was shaken, the magnetic particles quickly reformed into a shape resembling a Greek urn. Emulsion and Thermodynamics “Imagine your favorite Italian salad dressing,” says Thomas Russell, Silvio O. Conte Distinguished Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst and one of the paper’s senior authors. “It’s made up of...

Key Points * Saudi Arabia last year increased the valuation of its unexploited mineral resources from $1.3 trillion to $2.5 trillion, boosted by the discovery of rare earth elements and metals. * The kingdom on Wednesday announced a new mineral investment project valued at $100 billion, with $20 billion already in the final engineering phase or under construction. * Investment in critical minerals mining and processing must be happening “as fast and furious as possible” in Saudi Arabia, its energy minister said at the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh. =============================================================================== RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia is pushing ahead to...

Democrat Rep. Wiley Nickel (D-NC) is so bereaved by Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss and President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks that he is suggesting Democrats take action and form a “shadow government,” operating to oppose the Trump agenda that the majority if the country voted for. Nickel put forth his idea in an op-ed in the Washington Post, asserting that it is time for America to “borrow from our British friends and appoint a shadow cabinet to fight back against the worst excesses of a second Trump administration.” He laid out his vision on the House floor, asserting that “new...

Betelgeuse is our next door supergiant. It is almost 1000 times bigger than our sun and possibly it has already exploded in a giant supernova. How would we notice, how fast would the process be and what could we expect to see from Earth? Something happened in 2019 Betelgeuse is currently in the final stages of its short life. So when the red supergiant abruptly darkened in late 2019, the behavior led many to speculate that it might be about to explode. The loss of brightness was far greater than anything previously recorded. Analyzing data from Hubble Space Telescope and...

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland acknowledged Tuesday that the Biden administration’s climate agenda, which is reliant on global critical mineral supply chains, is strengthening China. During a House Appropriations Committee hearing on her agency’s proposed 2024 budget, Haaland was repeatedly grilled about the administration’s environmental policies blocking further domestic production of critical minerals and opening the door to further reliance on Chinese-sourced minerals. In one exchange with Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., Haaland affirmed that green energy sources “deepen” reliance on Chinese imports. “I’m telling you right now that 63% of rare earth mining [occurs in China],” Reschenthaler stated. “By deductive reasoning,...

A study published in the journal Prehistory Works, indicates that two objects sampled from the Villena Treasure were smithed using meteoric iron...The Villena Treasure is one of the most important Bronze Age hoard finds in the Iberian Peninsula, discovered by José María Soler in 1963 in Villena, Spain. Archaeologists uncovered a collection of bowls, bottles, and bracelets, which were ornately crafted from gold, silver, iron and amber.Iron was considered a precious metal before the advent of iron smelting, where meteoric iron was the only source of iron metal used to make jewellery, tools, and weapons during the Bronze Age.Iron sourced...

(CNN) - A furnace explosion at a Chinese-owned nickel factory in Indonesia on Sunday has killed at least 13 workers and injured 38 others, officials say. The incident took place at a factory in the Morowali Industrial Park on the island of Sulawesi. The factory is operated by Chinese steel and nickel giant Tsingshan, which has stakes in Indonesia’s lucrative nickel mining industry and runs operations under its local arm, Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel (ITSS). Morowali police spokesperson Ipda Hamid told CNN affiliate CNN Indonesia that 13 people had died at the scene, with multiple victims being rushed to nearby...

A new nickel-rich, single-crystal battery technology is on track for rapid deployment A seemingly simple shift in lithium-ion battery manufacturing could pay big dividends, improving electric vehicles’ (EV) ability to store more energy per charge and to withstand more charging cycles, according to new research led by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. An EV’s mileage depends on the deliverable energy from each of the constituent cells of its battery pack. For lithium-ion cells—which dominate the EV battery market—both the cell-level energy capacity and the cell cost are bottlenecked by the positive electrode, or cathode. Now that bottleneck...

The flight of money from Egypt has become a growing concern as many wealthy individuals seek to move money out of Egypt and keep their fortunes out of the eyes of the authorities. The Zambian Drug Enforcement Commission (DEC) intercepted an aircraft carrying five million dollars in cash and over 100kg of suspected gold at Kenneth Kaunda International Airport near the capital Lusaka on August 14, according to several sources. Found on the plane were $5,697,700 in cash, five pistols, seven magazines, 126 rounds of ammunition, 602 pieces of suspected gold weighing 127.7 kg, and equipment for measuring gold. Later,...

Global cobalt demand soared with the advent of cell phones and laptop computers. It exploded with the arrival of electric vehicles and now is skyrocketing in tandem with government EV mandates and subsidies. Cobalt improves battery performance, extends driving range and reduces fire risks. Demand will reach stratospheric heights if governments remain obsessed with climate change and Net Zero. States and nations would have to switch to electric cars, trucks, buses and tractors; end coal and gas electricity generation; convert gas furnaces, water heaters and stoves to electricity; and provide alternative power for windless, sunless periods. Electricity generation would triple...

Whether it was the Big Bang, Midas or God himself, we don’t really need to unlock the mystery of the origins of gold when we’ve already identified an asteroid worth $700 quintillion in precious heavy metals. If anything launches this metals mining space race, it will be this asteroid--Psyche 16, taking up residence between Mars and Jupiter and carrying around enough heavy metals to net every single person on the planet close to a trillion dollars. The massive quantities of gold, iron and nickel contained in this asteroid are mind-blowing. The discovery has been made. Now, it’s a question of...

The Psyche spacecraft was supposed to launch toward its namesake, a bizarre metallic space rock in the main asteroid belt, between August and October of this year. But issues with Psyche's flight software made it impossible to hit that window... Psyche will still launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as previously planned. 2022 liftoff would have delivered Psyche to its asteroid target in early 2026. But a 2023 launch requires a different trajectory, pushing the arrival back to August 2029... NASA's Janus smallsat mission, which is designed to study two separate binary...

... “For me, playing to win also means doing things differently. Doing things that others may question, but that we believe will put us in the winner’s circle the longest,” he said Wednesday during Toyota’s annual dealer meeting in Las Vegas, which, by the way, was called “Playing to Win.” Toyoda, who described Toyota as a large department store, said the company’s goal “remains the same, pleasing the widest possible range of customers with the widest possible range of powertrains.” Those powertrains will include hybrids and plug-in hybrids like the Prius, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles like the Mirai and 15...

EU and U.S. imports of Russia's main base metal products aluminium and nickel during March-June increased by as much as 70%, official trade data compiled by Reuters from the United Nations Comtrade database show. The total value of EU and U.S. imports of the two metals from March to June were $1.98 billion... Analysts said the United States and Europe have learned lessons after huge disruption on construction, auto and power sectors caused by sanctions imposed by former U.S. President Donald Trump on Russian aluminium 2018. Russia's Rusal is the world's largest aluminium producer outside China and accounts for about...

An illustration of the Psyche asteroid. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU) If you wanted to do a forensic study of the Solar System, you might head for the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That's where you can find ancient rocks from the Solar System's early days. Out there in the cold vacuum of space, far from the Sun, asteroids are largely untouched by space weathering. Space scientists sometimes refer to asteroids – and their meteorite fragments that fall to Earth – as time capsules because of the evidence they hold. The asteroid Psyche is especially interesting, and NASA is sending a mission...

Ford Motor Co.’s hot-selling Mustang Mach-E electric SUV and other plug-in models are being rendered unprofitable by rising raw material costs. “We actually had a positive bottom line profit when we launched the Mach-E, commodity costs have wiped that out,” Chief Financial Officer John Lawler said Wednesday at the Deutsche Bank Global Automotive Conference, referring to 2020, when the vehicle went on sale. “You’re going to see pressure on the bottom line when we launch our EVs, they’re not going to be positive.”

President Biden has tucked another $500 million to fund production of the minerals used to make batteries for electric cars into the Ukraine aid bill passed by Congress. Both Biden and Ukrainian leaders had said that the $40 billion emergency aid package was essential for Ukraine's war against Russia. But tucked into that package was not only military aid but half a billion dollars to be allocated under the Defense Production Act to companies obtaining critical battery minerals like nickel, cobalt, lithium and graphite, Bloomberg first noted. That's in addition to the $750 million the Defense Department (DOD) was authorized...

resident Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were roundly mocked by conservatives last week for suggesting that working-class Americans struggling to pay the ever-climbing prices at the pump should consider simply buying an electric vehicle instead. It was the Biden-era equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s (admittedly apocryphal) adage, “Let them eat cake.” Yet this simple solution floated by Democrat elites might just be even more fantastical than expecting average Americans to be in the financial position to switch to an EV as they struggle to afford groceries. Turns out, the U.S. doesn’t only rely on Russia for oil imports —...

Today’s hawky-dove announcement by The Fed (raises rates by only 25 basis points, but hints that many rate hikes are around the corner. The US Treasury 10Y-5Y curve has slumped to zero as inflation climbs and the number of rate hikes hits 7. Do I detect a trend? And then there is the USD OIS curve. Steep much? And electric battery metal, nickel, is surging … again. Up 66.25%. When they made Narcos, Pablo Escobar should have said “Nickel or Lead” instead of “Silver or Lead.”

KEY POINTS The LME said in a statement that it had been monitoring the evolving situation in Russia and Ukraine and it was evident this had affected the nickel market. Three-month nickel on the London Metal Exchange briefly jumped to a record high above $100,000 a metric ton, before paring gains. “It is a very dangerous market right now because this is a market that is not driven by supply and demand, it is driven by fear,” Saxo Bank’s Ole Hansen said Tuesday. The London Metal Exchange on Tuesday suspended the trading of nickel after prices more than doubled to...