China’s rare earth monopoly
If you’ve glanced over the periodic table, you’ve probably noticed the two series of elements that are placed outside the main table. These are the lanthanides and the actinides. The lanthanide series, along with two chemically similar elements, Scandium and Yttrium, together make up the rare earth elements. The first rare earth minerals, which contain rare earth elements, were found in 1787 near the Swedish village Ytterby. Their discovery is evident in the names: Yttrium, Ytterbium, Terbium, Erbium (all named for Ytterby); Scandium (Scandinavia); Europium (Europe); Holmium (Stockholm); Thulium (Thule, the mythical northern land); Lutetium (Lutetia, present day Paris); Gadolinium (after Johan Gadolin, a Finnish chemist who studied rare earths). But these days, it’s not the Swedes who mine rare earth elements, it’s the Chinese.
Rare earth elements aren’t rare in absolute terms. What’s rare is to find them in sufficient concentrations that mining them is economically viable. If you do find them, they will be in mineral form, and separating the different rare earth elements from each other is hard because of their chemical similarities. So why bother at all? Because rare earth elements have become indispensible to a host of modern technologies, from LED screens and hybrid cars to missiles, magnets and lasers. It used to be that the United States supplied most of the rare earth elements to world markets, but during the 1980s, China burst onto the scene, undercutting prices and quickly gathering a near-monopoly—more than 95% of the world’s supply of rare earth elements comes from China.
Naturally, this absolute dependence on China for materials crucial to modern technology makes the West, and the United States in particular, uneasy. The fear is that China will use their monopoly to political ends, as they did in 2010 when they stopped all shipments of rare earth elements to Japan during a diplomatic dispute. More recently, China announced new restrictions on exports, a move presumably made in order to favor China’s own developing industry. A number of projects attempting to supply rare earths outside China are underway.
There are environmental concerns, as well. China took many shortcuts in order to undercut US prices so heavily, and one of them was ignoring the environmental hazard their mining and processing of rare earths presented. Although the Chinese claim to have cleaned up their act environmentally, their mines may still not be up to international standards. This especially concerns the large number of illegal mines that operate—large profit margins attract businessmen on either side of the law.
(Image credit: original photo by Nick Mann for National Geographic, showing Samarium, a lanthanide metal and rare earth element.)
Maya glyphs seen in Palenque, present day Mexico. The Maya writing system is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been deciphered. It’s a complex system composed both of logograms (symbols representing words or morphemes) and syllabograms (symbols representing syllables). It was usually written in columns and read in pairs of two letters, left to right, top to bottom.
The key to deciphering Maya writing was found in the writings of the 16th century Spanish bishop Diego de Landa, who is infamous for his cruelty to the Maya and his large-scale destruction of their culture and customs. Despite his fervent attempts to convert the Maya to European, Christian ways, he compiled a small “alphabet” of the Maya script. It was based on the false assumption that there was a more or less one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, like in the Latin alphabet. Nevertheless, Landa’s alphabet has been important in the modern effort to figure out the way the Maya writing really works.
It’s an interesting historic fact that writing developed independently at least two times in history (possibly more), in Mesopotamia in Asia’s Fertile Crescent and later in Mesoamerica.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is the largest storm in the solar system. The hurricane has been going on for as long as humans have pointed telescopes at it, hundreds of years at the very least, and it’s twice as wide as the diameter of the Earth. Lately, it’s been shrinking, but not slowing down. This picture (here digitally processed) was originally taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979. Voyager is the man-made object that’s traveled farthest from Earth. At the moment, the distance between Voyager 1 and our planet is more than 100 times more than the average distance between Earth and the Sun. At some point in the not too distant future, it will leave the solar system entirely.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is the largest storm in the solar system. The hurricane has been going on for as long as humans have pointed telescopes at it, hundreds of years at the very least, and it’s twice as wide as the diameter of the Earth. Lately, it’s been shrinking, but not slowing down. This picture (here digitally processed) was originally taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979. Voyager is the man-made object that’s traveled farthest from Earth. At the moment, the distance between Voyager 1 and our planet is more than 100 times more than the average distance between Earth and the Sun. At some point in the not too distant future, it will leave the solar system entirely.
Although the US symbolically won the space race by putting men on the Moon in 1969, the Soviets did have their fair share of milestones, especially in the early years. On October 4, 1957, they launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. Only a month later, on November 3, 1957, fifty-four years ago, they launched Sputnik 2, containing the first living creature to enter space.
Laika was a stray dog picked up from the streets in Moscow, and one of three dogs to be trained for the Sputnik mission. She was placed in a tiny compartment fitted with an oxygen generator and a carbon dioxide absorbing device. There was a waste disposal system and food, in the form of a gelatinous mixture of nutrients, was prepared for seven days. There were never any plans for the dog to return safely to Earth—the technology didn’t allow it—but in 2002, after decades of speculation about her fate, it was revealed that the dog died of overheating and stress only hours into the mission, not after several days, as previously believed.
Other milestones the USSR beat the US to include photographing the far side of the Moon (1959) and, of course, putting the first human into space, Yuri Gagarin (April 12, 1961).
It’s that time of year again: for a few weeks, writers everywhere can get away summarizing what they’ve already said rather than writing anything new. As a reader, I appreciate it, because I don’t obsessively follow every magazine, every blog, so it’s likely I’ll have missed something in the…
The audio really makes this 360-degree panoramic come to life. These folks did a fantastic job.
Apollo 11 Interactive Panorama
Thanks to the nice folks at PhotoJPL.com, you can hang out with Buzz and Neil at Tranquility Base. Click through above for complete lunarcy. That amazing experience was stitched together from photos that Armstrong himself took.
Want more lunar panoramas? Relive most of the Apollo landings here. You’ll essentially feel like this the whole time.
don’t forget to click on that last link. Its #NSFW, but it’s hilarious.
Breathtaking was the right word.
I think my eyes went to the size of bread plates.
Wheee! Curiosity’s Descent to Mars, in Enhanced 1080 HD
Thanks to some image editing, Daniel Luke Fitch’s version of the rover’s Mars approach is extra crisp and breathtaking.
If robots can think like us, would they deserve rights? At what point would we need to start thinking about artificially intelligent robots less as things and more as something else…
Maybe that’s too deep for this time of day. Happy Hour anyone?
How long before robots can think like us?
Will this summer be remembered as a turning point in the story of man versus machine? On June 23, with little fanfare, a computer program came within a hair’s breadth of passing the Turing test, a kind of parlour game for evaluating machine intelligence devised by mathematician Alan Turing more than 60 years ago.
Turing proposed the test – he called it “the imitation game” – in a 1950 paper titled “Computing machinery and intelligence”. Back then, computers were very simple machines, and the field known as Artificial Intelligence (AI) was in its infancy. But already scientists and philosophers were wondering where the new technology would lead. In particular, could a machine “think”?
