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22:20 GMT
They’re called rare earths. The name’s a lie but the scarcity isn’t
When Swedish lieutenant-turned-rockhound Carl Axel Arrhenius picked up an odd black stone near the village of Ytterby in 1787, chemists called the ore “rare Earth.” “Rare” meant no one had seen it before, and “Earth” was 18th‑century shorthand for an acid‑ …
Source:
Interesting Engineering - New York
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