The largest identified global resources of barite are found in the Qinling and Jiangnan regions of southern China and the Cuddapah district of India. In 2018, China was the largest producer of…
Field Notes
20 Interesting Facts About Antimony
Antimony is an important mineral commodity used widely in modern industrialized societies and considered by many nations to be a Critical Resource Mineral because of its applications in aerospace and defense. There…
20 Interesting Facts About Tellurium
Tellurium is critical to efficient, thin-film photovoltaic cells that produce electricity from sunlight. Several materials can replace tellurium in most of its uses, but with losses in efficiency and product characteristics. With…
NIX Platform Develops SIGMA For Proof-of-Stake
First interviewing NIX October 2018, I’ve followed NIX development for some time. This week I sat down with the NIX team to chat on SIGMA, which seems to be a primary solution…
Spectrecoin’s Ring-Signature Stealth Staking
With a serious zerocoin flaw recently coming to light and impacting many popular privacy tech projects, I thought it pertinent to chat with Spectrecoin, which introduced a first-of-its-kind ring-signature-based stealth staking protocol…
20 Interesting Facts About Helium
Helium is an industrial commodity with many more important uses than party balloons and making your voice sound funny. Its use is essential in medicine, gas for aircraft, pressurizing rockets and other…
20 Interesting Facts About Arsenic
A crystalline metalloid found in minerals such as arsenopyrite, realgar and orpiment, the infamous arsenic has an amazing history – from the time of the Roman Empire to the Victorian era, arsenic…
20 Interesting Facts About Bismuth
Bismuth is a brittle, crystalline, post-transition metal with unusually low levels of electrical and thermal conductivity. Bismuth also has a particularly low melting point, which enables it to form alloys important for…
20 Interesting Facts About Tungsten
Tungsten is a very dense, corrosion-resistant metal that is almost impossible to melt. In fact, tungsten has the highest melting point of all metals. Tungsten exhibits other important physical properties as well,…
20 Interesting Facts About Magnesium
Named for the Greek city of Magnesia, magnesium is an silvery-white alkaline earth metal essential for animal and plant nutrition. Magnesium in plants is located in the enzymes, in the heart of…