Tantalum

Nick Niarchos reports on the Democratic Republic of the Congo's attempts to use its vast mineral resources as leverage in foreign policy amid military threats.

The surge in violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has some commentators blaming a familiar scapegoat: mineral trade and American technology companies whose products contain...

This new superconducting prototype quantum processor achieved benchmarking results to rival Google's new Willow QPU.

ZrC has drawn wide attention as an anti-ablation coating material for lightweight C/C composites but is limited by the produced porous and loose ZrO2 film. To address this issue, the second phase is introduced to improve the densification of the formed Zr-X-O film. Such as ZrC-SiC/TaC coating, the produced low-melting-point oxides, SiO2 (Tm=1650 °C), Ta2O5 (Tm=1800 °C) and Zr6Ta2O17 (Tm=1900 °C), helped to form a…

International lawyers representing the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo have said that Apple's supply chain could include "conflict...

A bomb at a refugee camp in eastern Congo has killed at least 5 people, including children, a spokesperson for the Congolese army said Friday.

Congo's government is questioning Apple about the tech company's knowledge of "blood minerals" from a conflict zone in the African country that could be smuggled into supply chains

Douglas Vakoch of METI International explains how NASA drew on the organisation's expertise at attempting to contact extraterrestrial intelligence to help craft a message to Europa

When it launches in October, the agency's Europa Clipper spacecraft will carry a richly layered dispatch that includes more than 2.6 million names submitted by the public.

The commercial importance of lithium is ever-growing, and its production is globally dominated by lithium-cesium-tantalum (LCT) pegmatites. These are spectacular rocks featuring impressive ultra-coarse textures, but they are very elusive due to a combination of factors: they are small, and until a decade ago, they were often regarded as nothing more than a geological curiosity. As a result, our knowledge of LCT…

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a photonic circuit on a chip that transforms a single incoming beam of laser light into a panoply of new beams, each with a host of different optical properties.

Take a look inside the lab and factory of Boston Metal, the green steel startup that has attracted attention from the World Bank and ArcelorMittal.

Whether it's baking a cake, building a house, or developing a quantum device, the quality of the end product significantly depends on its ingredients or base materials. Researchers working to improve the performance of superconducting qubits, the foundation of quantum computers, have been experimenting using different base materials in an effort to increase the coherent lifetimes of qubits.

The authors develop a new oxide-dispersion-strengthened NiCoCr-based alloy using a model-driven alloy design approach and laser-based additive manufacturing, showing how such designs can provide superior compositions using far fewer resources than previous methods.

Most carbon emissions caused by businesses are hidden from sight. US and California regulators are pushing to require companies fully disclose them.

Researchers have used a novel 3D printing technique to create a new superalloy with "previously unobtainable combinations of high strength, low weight and high-temperature resiliency" – and they say the implications in aerospace and energy are huge.

Custom clad metal products that can achieve specific performance properties for a wide range of battery, fuel cell, and SOFC (solid oxide fuel cell) power generations have been introduced by Anomet Products.

X-ray diffraction measurements under laser-driven dynamic compression allow researchers to investigate the atomic structure of matter at hundreds of thousands of atmospheres of pressure and temperatures of thousands of degrees, with broad implications for condensed matter physics, planetary science and astronomy.

A new approach uses data from one type of test on small metal alloy samples to extract enough information for building databases that can be used to predict the properties and potentials of new materials. The details were published in the journal Science and Technology of Advanced Materials: Methods.