News
An American engineer just spent his own savings buying back the last two robots that bore through rock without touching it, cooking 44, 000-PSI quartzite with an 1, 800-degree gas jet, after the company that built them folded
3+ hour, 22+ min ago (1300+ words) Every tunnel boring machine on Earth works on the same brutally simple idea. A wheel studded with steel discs spins against the rock face, crushes it into rubble, and conveyors haul the mess out the back. That is why the…...
A California company built a seabed mining drone that hovers above the ocean floor instead of crawling it, picking up battery metals one nodule at a time with 16 arms, and leaving nearly a third behind on purpose, the ones with living things attached
1+ week, 1+ day ago (1356+ words) The usual picture of deep-sea mining is a giant tractor crawling along the ocean floor, sucking rocks up by the ton and pumping them four kilometers to a ship on the surface. That picture is accurate. It's how the company…...
Canada has $10 billion in nickel sitting in old mining waste, metal already dug up once and thrown away. Nobody could afford to get it back, so a research group is feeding 150 years of that garbage to a tank of bacteria instead
3+ week, 1+ day ago (587+ words) Sudbury has been a mining town for roughly a century and a half, which means the region is ringed with tailings, the leftover rock and sediment left after ore gets its first pass through processing. Those piles aren't empty. They're…...
Most people know antimony as the stuff that keeps couches from catching fire. The Pentagon knows it as what goes in armor-piercing rounds, and China controls it, so a 168-year-old mine in rural Australia is coming back to life
3+ week, 1+ day ago (122+ words) Most people, if they have heard of antimony at all, know it as the thing that keeps couches and curtains from catching fire. That is fair enough. Its single biggest use is as a flame retardant, and it also turns…...
China just started drilling with a 500-ton machine it calls an "underground aircraft carrier," boring a vertical shaft a kilometer deep, and it cracked the hardest problem by copying a pencil sharpener
3+ week, 3+ day ago (291+ words) For scale, 500 metric tons is roughly the weight of the reactor pressure vessel the world's largest crane just lowered into Hinkley Point C. Except nobody lifts this thing into place and walks away. It hangs in its own shaft and ratchets…...
Saudi Arabia sits on the largest sand sea on Earth, a desert the size of France, and still imports sand from Australia to build its towers. The reason is in the shape of every single grain
3+ week, 4+ day ago (60+ words) Don't bite your tongue. Speak up. Luis Reyes " Jun 11, 2026 Olivia Richman " May 30, 2026 Luis Reyes " May 25, 2026 Luis Reyes " May 28, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 2, 2026 Olivia Richman " May 26, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 14, 2026 Olivia Richman " Jun 13, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 13, 2026...
An off-grid gold mine in the Australian outback just ran 155 straight hours, six and a half days, with every engine switched off, powering the underground works, the plant and the workers' village on sun, wind and one battery
3+ week, 6+ day ago (48+ words) Don't bite your tongue. Speak up. Luis Reyes " May 28, 2026 Luis Reyes " May 25, 2026 Olivia Richman " May 15, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 9, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 3, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 1, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 12, 2026...
The rocks grow a few millimeters every million years, four kilometers down in the dark, loaded with cobalt, nickel and rare earths. A machine that works like a vacuum cleaner is about to suck them up by the million tons
3+ week, 6+ day ago (59+ words) Agree or laugh out loud? Luis Reyes " May 21, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 5, 2026 Olivia Richman " May 18, 2026 Olivia Richman " May 27, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 9, 2026 Olivia Richman " Jun 3, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 12, 2026 Olivia Richman " Jun 11, 2026 Luis Reyes " Jun 11, 2026...
Two American companies just announced a plant to turn Texas brine into battery cathode powder on site, with the lithium sitting under the parking lot, aiming for the first ore-to-cell battery chain on US soil
1+ mon, 1+ day ago (84+ words) And the two aren't starting from a blank sheet. Both say they've already run demonstration-scale production (Wildcat's cathode in San Diego, Energy X's lithium carbonate in Hooks) and shipped samples to buyers in grid storage, mobility and defense. Luis Reyes…...
Twenty-Five Years Ago an MIT Professor Used Hardware-Store Glass-Etching Cream to Frost His Bathroom Windows. The Same Chemical Just Halved the Cost of Getting Lithium From Rock " the Reason China Controls Refining
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (556+ words) The MIT spinout commercializing it is called Rock Zero, and it has already designed a pilot plant. The team also came to spodumene sideways. That same etching-cream chemistry is useful for making the highly reactive silica that goes into low-carbon…...