It’ll be a snap to identify gemstones once Robert Downs finishes his library of spectral fingerprints for all the Earth’s minerals. Downs is almost halfway there. So far, the associate professor of ...

Did you know that minerals are all around us? Minerals are the building blocks that make up rocks! They are the ores that we extract metals from to make electronics. They’re in the soils we need to ...

New research published in Nature Communications identifies an iron sulfate on Mars that may represent a brand-new mineral. The paper is titled "Characterization of ferric hydroxysulfate on Mars and ...