Ms Chegwidden says announcements of rare-earth projects around the world have accelerated in recent months.
China curtailed rare-earth quotas earlier this year, citing environmental concerns and efforts to quell smuggling.
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We see this in the rare-earth sector, where the Chinese underbid competitors around the world.
The only thing that makes those technologies smaller, thinner, and lighter is the rare-earth element.
Rare-earth minerals are crucial for products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.
The plant is finally operating, but prices for some rare-earth elements are now 80% off their peaks.
These low temperatures allow for a quick start-up, a more compact design, and less use of rare-earth materials.
Casual investors would take one look at Molycorp, the producer of rare-earth minerals used in electronics, and run away.
What then might be the most rare-earth-intensive manufacturing to end up inside China?
Companies like venture-backed NovaTorque have produced cleverly designed high-performance rare-earth-free electric motors.
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The high prices fetched for copper, gold and rare-earth minerals are leading to a surge in interest in mining the ocean floor.
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Also present in the region are lithium, vanadium, and rare-earth metals, not to mention a potential for uranium and diamonds.
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FYI, TMR is tracking a total of 429 rare-earth projects under development associated with 261 different companies in 37 different countries.
Asteroids could yield precious minerals such as gold, platinum and rare-Earth metals.
For instance, Chinese producers of rare-earth minerals first drove down prices to uneconomic levels, and this led to the closing of mines elsewhere.
Yixing Xinwei processes and refines rare-earth mineral compounds, which are used in a variety of products from semiconductors to fluorescent lights (see accompanying box).
China's domination of the global production of rare-earth minerals in particular has fuelled the search for other sources of materials essential for everything from electronics to wind turbines.
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The newest over-ear model from Scosche features the company's proprietary headphone design that utilizes 40mm drivers made from rare-earth neodymium magnets and precision wound copper voice coiling to create an incredibly accurate musical reproduction.
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The threads running through all of this are price and scarcity: a price to signal the relative scarcity of a good such as a rare-earth metal, and that relative scarcity in turn to stimulate innovation.
Chen Ningning built an early fortune in the steel business but now most of her fortune lies in publicly traded Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Group, where she is an investor (not an executive).
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Lawyers for the defendant in this case seemed to focus their argument on the fact that rare-earth magnets were not commercially feasible until a few years ago (and evidently not available in the 1960s) when the lock was first developed.
Where once the West relied on China's lack of environmental enforcement to tamp down rare-earth prices and implicitly subsidize high-tech goods, in the future the nature of the subsidy will change so that China's cheap(er) labor will subsidize Western mid-tech goods.
But to do that, American manufacturers need to have access to rare earth materials -- which China supplies.
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That, in turn, has created a boom time for would-be rare earth miners like Lynas (OTC: LYSDY) and Avalon (TSE: AVL).
The two superpowers are competing over a valuable new resource -- the rare earth elements used in the construction of nearly all smartphones, tablets and other electronic gadgets.
He was questioned on the mining and future availability of metals such as cobalt, platinum and titanium, as well as so-called "rare earth metals" which as used in magnets and nanotechnology.
Metals, platinum-group elements, rare earth elements, and other volatiles, like H, H2O, and carbon compounds, are abundant on asteroids, many of which are relatively accessible from Earth.
The analysis released Wednesday showed more than 20 ingestions were of high-powered, "rare earth" magnets.
The science team likened its chemistry to some relatively rare but well-studied alkaline rocks on Earth found on oceanic islands such as Hawaii and the Azores, and also in rift zones like the Rio Grande.
In doing due diligence on Molycorp, Bhappu learned that many consumers of rare earth elements desperately wanted a Western-supply source.
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