It’ll be a snap to identify gemstones once Robert Downs finishes his library of spectral fingerprints for all the Earth’s minerals. Downs is almost halfway there. So far, the associate professor of ...

When news broke late last month that an unidentified bright blue mineral had been found in Adventure Mining Company’s historic Upper Peninsula copper mine, many people made speculations on social ...

What makes a mineral critical? Put simply, critical minerals help create the essential everyday items we all use. But these minerals may not be easy to get. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest ...

Swedish physician, botanist and zoologist Carl von Linné is today famous as the father of binomial nomenclature, a system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts ...

Everyone switched off their headlamps and there we stood together in total darkness, inside the San Gabriel Mountains. Yes, inside. I had joined a local caving group in an attempt to understand more ...

Did you know that minerals are all around us? Minerals are the building blocks that make up rocks! They are the ores that we extract metals from to make electronics. They’re in the soils we need to ...