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 ...

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 ...