In August Lorenzo Zambrano, the chairman and CEO of Cemex, the world's biggest building-materials supplier, which built its empire out of the limestone cliffs of Monterrey, vented his anger on Twitter.

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On November 7th Wendel said it had raised to 15.5% the stake of 6% that it had bought in Saint-Gobain, one of the world's leading building-materials companies, barely six weeks earlier.

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Once they can manipulate atoms--which combine to form molecules, the building blocks of our natural world--scientists can create new building blocks that produce new materials with the exact properties they desire: smaller, stronger, tougher, lighter and more resilient than what has come before.

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It's calculated 1, 200, 000 tonnes of building materials were pulverised at the World Trade Center and most minerals are present in the dust (not necessarily in a large quantity).

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