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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Cutaway illustration of the planet Mars, detailing the solid inner core and surrounding mantle. A mineral unknown on Earth could be the most abundant mineral on Mars, according to a discovery made ...