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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

"Our work solves this problem in a way that we think is uniquely scalable." Enhanced weathering In nature, common minerals called silicates react with water and atmospheric CO 2 to form stable ...