The Magnets the Future Runs On & the Country That Controls Them The strongest permanent magnet ever commercialised is a small slug of iron, boron, and a rare-earth metal called neodymium — and it is hiding inside almost everything that…
The Future Uses of Platinum For fifty years, the biggest thing platinum did was clean up car exhaust. Roughly two of every five ounces mined went into catalytic converters, and a diesel converter alone can hold six grams of it.…
The Metals a Humanoid Robot Actually Runs On Strip a humanoid robot down to what makes it move and you find the same part repeated more than forty times: a small, powerful electric motor. Tesla’s Optimus carries on the order…
The Coldest Machines on Earth Run on a Gas Made From Nuclear Warheads A working quantum computer has to sit colder than deep space. Its qubits hold information only when the temperature drops to about 10 to 20 thousandths of…
The Future Uses of Copper Copper is trading at prices no one has ever paid before. In mid-July 2026 the London Metal Exchange cash price sits around $13,500 per tonne, after blowing through its December 2025 record of $11,771 and…
The Future Uses of Silver Industry now burns through more silver every year than every mine on Earth pulls out of the ground. The Silver Institute expects 2026 to close with a sixth straight annual deficit, and the gap is…
Fusion plants would burn 500 million gold targets a year. Satellites vaporize their gold on reentry. AI servers, central banks and a flat mine supply — how future tech is rewriting gold demand.
The Fern That Grows Its Own Rare-Earth Ore On a weathered hillside in southern China, a scrambling fork fern called Dicranopteris linearis pulls rare earth elements out of the ground and packs them into its fronds until they make up…
