At one point, the nearby Climax mine produced close to 75 percent of the world's molybdenum, which is used as a hardening agent for steel in cars, as well as incomputerchips and monitors.
Accuracy is generally an important consideration incomputerchips, but a team of researchers led by Rice University are touting a new "inexact" chip (dubbed PCMOS) that they say could lead to as much as a fifteen-fold increase in efficiency.