ROCK STARS: For 70 years, the Mineral Research Laboratory in Asheville’s South Slope neighborhood has worked with mining companies around the world to come up with efficient ways to harvest and ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Gaze for a moment at your smartphone. The circuitry contains a hard-to-get metal called tantalum. The jingling speaker requires neodymium. For that ...

Swiss naturalist and physician Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim - better known as Paracelsus -was among the first naturalists to study how the fumes, dust and ash found in a ...

Michigan researchers were part of a team that has solved a 200-year mystery of growing a common mineral in a laboratory, a development that may one day allow them to produce the substance for ...

Like many abandoned mines, the Eureka uranium mine in northern Spain is a maze of long, dank tunnels. Water seeping down the walls carries dissolved substances that percolated through rocks overhead.

Despite seeming like a relatively stable place, the Earth's surface has changed dramatically over the past 4.6 billion years. Mountains have been built and eroded, continents and oceans have moved ...