Color TV broadcasts started in this country in the 1950s but really didn’t take off until the mid-60s. In 1972 half of the television sets in the US were color. I remember our family getting a color TV (and cable!) right about then. Very few all black-and-white TV stations remained by the end of that decade.

One of the barriers to color reception was red. Color is displayed on screens by means of phosphors. These are materials that emit light when exposed to radiant energy. In a TV, an electron beam activates the luminescent substance. Different chemicals give off different colors.

In the case of red, the key breakthrough was the use of the lanthanoid or rare-earth element Europium. Yttrium orthovanadate (YVO₄) is “doped” with a small amount of europium oxide (Eu₂O₃) to produce a bright red glow. TV sets contain about a half a gram to a gram of Eu₂O₃.

The European Union takes advantage of europium oxide’s luminescent property by embedding it in fibers in their banknotes. This is an anti-counterfeiting measure. You can see the red stripe that emerges under UV light in the 100-euro bill:

Europium has no known biological role and is not toxic. Europium is one of the rarest of the lanthanoids. In the Mountain Pass Mine in California, our only domestic source of REEs (rare earth elements), europium is a tiny fraction (0.2%) of the ore.

One of the reasons that energy costs go up over time is that it gets harder to extract a resource as it gets depleted. The oil that was close to the surface or in easily accessible sites was pumped out first. These days we need deeper wells. Or wells in crazy places like the Arctic or the open ocean. And we have to employ new methods like hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

The low-hanging fruit has been picked.

This is an issue for any resource. Minerals are no exception. Here’s a bit from an Allianz Research trade report (Metals and Mining: Do we live in a material world?):

“Furthermore, as accessible high-grade deposits become rare, mining companies are increasingly targeting deeper or lower-grade deposits, which require more sophisticated, hazardous and costly extraction techniques.”

If you can’t grow it, you have to mine it. But it is getting harder, and it takes longer. The “green energy” transition will require enormous investments in mines and minerals. That’s going to require planning ahead as the lead times are significant. Take a look at the chart below. Mines are big, messy, complex things with a lot of impacts. And the industry hasn’t done much to win the public’s trust so you can understand the pushback in the form of increased regulations.

Of course we could always just get our minerals from mines in the third world, or places where there is little or no oversight. But miners don’t like to invest in sketchy places. They like law and order. They want to keep their properties and their profits. Here at home we have the regulations in place so that we can mine intelligently. And we have courts and rules and banks and everything else for businesses to prosper.

So, let’s get those shovels in the ground already!

Tellurides are minerals formed with the telluride anion (Te^2-). Both gold and silver form tellurides, the most common being a mineral called sylvanite [(Au,Ag)Te₄]. Gold and silver were mined extensively around the town of Telluride in Colorado, but interestingly no gold telluride minerals have been found there! Seems like the Chamber of Commerce needs to get on that one. The local mines were rich in lead, zinc, and copper as well.

Tellurium (Te, #74) is a metalloid in Group 16 of the periodic table. Groups (or “families”) are the columns in the table—the rows are called periods. Tellurium is in the same family as oxygen, sulfur, and selenium. There are fungi that can substitute tellurium for either selenium or sulfur in metabolic processes but it otherwise has no biological function.

Tellurium is usually obtained as a by-product of copper refining. Its primary use is in solar cells. Cadmium telluride (CdTe) panels are more efficient than the more common crystalline silicon types so expect demand for this rare element to increase.

California is no stranger to fortune-seekers. The state was founded on the Gold Rush and built by the Oil Boom.

Silicon Valley is our latest El Dorado. Our tech overlords have a new hype wand. They call it AI. And no one wields the gilded baton better than Santa Clara’s NVIDIA.

The computer systems and computer programs that make up what we call AI need the best chips, and NVIDIA makes them. Of course these massive projects have an equally massive energy demand. We don’t see the carbon and environmental footprint of the tech industry and that gives them an unassailable clean image. The Gold Rush and the Oil Boom spawned a lot of environmental laws, by comparison. Big Tech off-shores all its dirty work, and their toxins seep quietly into the groundwater.

NVIDIA is now the most valuable company in the world. Or maybe not. These things change on a whim.

Frik Els over at mining.com put together a graphic comparing the market capitalization of the fifty biggest mining companies in the world to one tech company, NVIDIA. There’s no comparison. All fifty companies combined just tops a trillion dollars (~$1.4T). NVIDIA is worth more than twice that!

You can’t have AI or Big Tech without copper and silicon and aluminum and gold and germanium and gallium and arsenic and so on. And so on and so on. Minerals are the basis of society. That is, all the non-food aspects of society. What can’t be grown must be mined. And without mining there’s no modern agriculture.

But AI is the stuff of dreams. And that beats digging holes in the ground any day.

July 11 was World Population Day.

The current estimate of world population is 8.1 billion or 8100 million or 8,100,000,000,000 people. That’s 8.1 x 10¹² (8.1 E 12) for you math nerds. If you can’t do a superscript, exponents are commonly indicated with a caret (shift-6) as in 8.1 x 10^12.

That’s a lot of folks. Population growth mainly occurs in poor places. As people get wealthier and freer, they live longer and have fewer children. Wealthy countries have slow or stagnant population growth. Poor countries are growing fast. That’s why so many people emigrate—they are seeking better economic opportunities. Wealthy countries like ours benefit from immigration. We need a younger workforce.

We have the ability to feed the world. And to house the un-housed. We aren’t going to run out of space or resources. Economic growth, fueled by technological innovation, will ultimately bring people out of poverty and misery. Wherever the rule of law and the opportunity for economic growth exist people can be lifted to a higher station in life.

Our future does not have to be the dystopian nightmare our Silicon Valley overlords have imposed upon us. We don’t have to spend all our energy and resources upgrading our cell phones. We could focus on food, water, shelter, and civilization instead. We don’t need any more social media platforms. We need a society that cares about those less fortunate than ourselves.

Tungsten is tough stuff. It’s as dense as gold or uranium and it is also the hardest metal to melt. And it has the highest tensile strength. A small amount of tungsten added to steel makes the steel stronger. Tungsten alloys are thus everywhere.

The symbol for Tungsten is W from the German word wolfram and the main ore of tungsten is wolframite.

One of the interesting compounds made with tungsten is tungsten carbide or WC. It’s a powder and can be shaped into many forms. It’s as hard as corundum or sapphire, corrosion-resistant, and is many times stronger than steel.

When fine powders are compressed to a point just short of liquefaction they fuse together. The process is called sintering. Brass is commonly sintered, for example. Sintering is used with tungsten carbide because of the very high melting point of both elements. Sintered WC has many applications for machine tools, especially in extreme environments, and its hardness makes it a great abrasive. It has to be polished with diamonds but it holds its luster and doesn’t break or scratch. Sounds like good stuff to make jewelry from, and that is a major use for WC. Here’s an example:

We attended the fourth NoirCon in Philadelphia in the fall of 2014. That was a long journey—we took the train. This one is a little closer. A drive down the east side of the Sierras seems like the way to go.

The guy on the poster is the late American author David Goodis.

I turn 65 on the 13th of November. NoirCon will be a fine birthday present!

Apollo astronauts were my heroes when I was a kid. I remember Apollo 8 vividly, and I did a report on Apollo 9 for school. And everyone of my age group remembers Apollo 11 and the moon landings. Bill Anders, one of the three-man crew of Apollo 8, died last week at age 90. He was still flying and was killed in his T-34 while attempting a stunt maneuver near his home in northwest Washington. I hope I’m still walking if I make it to 90!

Anders took a photograph of the earth in December of 1968 when Apollo 8 was rounding the far side of the moon. No humans had ever seen that view. The photo came to be called “Earthrise” and is one of the most famous images of our time.

Speaking of the moment, Anders said: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth.” (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw99wj5e5q8o)

The Apollo missions were powered by the largest rocket ever built, the Saturn V. It took 68 hours for Apollo 8 to reach the moon. And that was just three guys. Imagine outfitting a larger crew for a more extended stay. It’s easy to see that space travel is a pretty silly notion. Space exploration on the other hand, is pretty cool. Apollo 8 was 56 years ago. Humans haven’t traveled any further into space since then but they’ve certainly explored a lot more.

Robots are better for space than humans anyway. Humans need a blue planet. Robots can live and work in a vacuum. They can be irradiated. They can operate round-the-clock. They can travel further, see farther, collect more data, and best of all they don’t have to come home safely. They’re cheaper, too.

We know more about space than we do about our own blue planet, especially the blue part. The oceans are the source of all life. We should take better care of them.

Maria Sklowdowska, better known to the world as Marie Curie, discovered the element Radium with the help of her husband Pierre. It was her research—Pierre was smart enough to recognize his wife’s genius— and he abandoned his work in favor of hers. The original power couple (along with Henri Becquerel) were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for their work on radioactivity. She coined the term.

Radium is a daughter product. Naturally-occurring uranium decays and radium is the result. Curie was also awarded another Nobel, this time for chemistry, in 1911. She was a widow by then, Pierre having been killed in a road accident in 1906. Speaking of daughters, their daughter Irene was awarded the Chemistry Nobel in 1935 (along with her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie).

Marie Curie was active in WWI setting up X-ray units in field hospitals. It is likely that those exposures led to her death in 1934 at age 66 from anemia. Although she and her husband were both exposed to lots of ionizing radiation in their laboratory work, and their papers are still too “hot” for researchers to handle, they likely would not have been sickened by radium without ingesting it.

That leads me to the infamous and tragic story of the Radium Girls of the U.S. Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company. These young women workers in the 1920s painted things with glow-in-the-dark paint. It contained radium. While these salts are only mildly radioactive, the ladies were told to lick the brushes to get a fine tip. Thus they ingested the stuff and were poisoned. Hundreds were sickened, dozens died. The companies finally had to pay up a decade later.

Here’s the thing—the executives knew radium was toxic but kept quiet about it, then claimed ignorance when confronted later with their perfidy. Sadly, scheming corporate scumbags who put profit over people are still with us.

Check out Kate Moore’s 2017 The Radium Girls or Claudia Clark’s 2000 Radium Girls (UNC Press).

I read a lot of books. Mostly novels, both contemporary and vintage. Sometimes a book really stands out. This novel, Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde, is one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

It’s science fiction, or more precisely “cli-fi” or climate fiction. This is a big topic these days as you can imagine. These novels are usually called “dystopian” and you could say that about Eleutheria but it is also hopeful, and surprisingly upbeat. You can also read it as a coming-of-age tale.

The ending might be the best part. It has many possibilities, but it’s also a resolution for our unique protagonist. Eleutheria checks in at a relatively economical 322 pages which is a relief from the flood of overlong modern books. I feel like I could chop 100 pages off of most of today’s novels (and half an hour off most of today’s movies!) without hurting them. Not so this book. Hyde doesn’t waste words and doesn’t waste your time with diversions and self-indulgent blather.

I think you should go out and get this book and give it a read and then tell your friends to do the same. By the way, “Eleutheria” is an island in the Bahamas and is pronounced “Eh-LOO-thuh-ruh.” It’s also the name of a play by Samuel Beckett. It’s a Greek word (ἐλευθερία) that means “liberty.”