metals

I recently dropped by EarsNova's spacious new high-end audio store, which has the best-looking showrooms I've seen in a long while. The vibe was relaxed, and the demo rooms' sound was pretty special, but it was the little Magico Q1 speaker that bowled me over.

Were my eyes deceiving me? How could this big sound come from such a small speaker? The sheer physicality and beauty of the sound required some recalibration of my senses to take it all in. Most bona fide high-end speakers are big, imposing things that dominate a room. They're so huge that … Read more

No one wants to stumble upon the radiation warning sign. But its presence at least indicates that hazardous materials have been detected, and that there might be some form of control of those materials.

In high-risk scenarios without up-to-date signage (war zones, abandoned testing sites, and now airport security lines), it could prove quite handy to have a handheld device that can detect hard radiation--including nuclear weapons.

Chemists at Northwestern University report in the journal Advanced Materials that they are one step closer to developing such a device.

"We have designed promising semiconductor materials that, once optimized, could be … Read more

Valuable metals contained in electronics and green-technology products are being recycled at "discouragingly" low rates, raising the prospect of material shortages, according to a United Nations-sponsored report.

The U.N. report, released last week, found a wide disparity in metal recycling rates and very low rates among even highly prized metals, such as gold, from electronics. The study recommends using product designs that make recycling easier and addressing the problem of obsolete electronics. About 18 percent of TVs and PCs are recycled and about 10 percent of cell phones, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Less than one third of about 60 metals had an end-of-life recycling rate over 50 percent and 34 elements had a recycling rate below 1 percent. In addition to creating a larger supply of metals, recycling is estimated to be two to 10 times more resource-efficient than smelting metals from ore, according to the study.

"In theory, metals can be used over and over again, minimizing the need to mine and process virgin materials and thus saving substantial amounts of energy and water while minimizing environmental degradation," said Achim Steiner, U.N. under-secretary general and executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, in a statement.

Lead, which is most commonly used in batteries, is the most recycled, with a rate around 80 percent. Iron and other components of stainless steel are recycled at over 50 percent, as are precious metals platinum, gold, and silver. Gold is recycled at a high rate from industrial use, but only 10 percent to 15 percent from electronics, such as cell phones.

Meanwhile, there are several metals considered vital to green-technology… Read more

Liquid Metal Battery, a company pursuing a breakthrough battery design, has attracted Bill Gates and an oil driller as seed investors.

Many battery companies are working to improve existing technology, but the founders of Liquid Metal Battery are taking an unusual approach that they hope will slash energy storage costs and deliver batteries able to store several hours of wind and solar power. The target of the company, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is to have demonstration systems connected to the grid in three to five years, executives said. An official announcement of the series … Read more

Magico, based in Berkeley, Calif., has established itself as a major American high-end speaker manufacturer in just a few years. The company builds state-of-the-art speakers with truly innovative technology. I've listened to a lot of large and not-so-large Magico speakers over the years, and was never less than astonished by their sound. The company is just now introducing its smallest speaker ever, the Q1 ($24,950 per pair). The Q1's cabinet is an extensively braced-aluminum-and-copper design.

It's a small monitor speaker, but it's sold with an integrated stand. Mounted on the stand, the Q1 measures 44 … Read more

WORCESTER, Mass.--The electronic waste piling up in our closets and basements holds valuable material that could be used to make something new, as is the case with old newspapers and plastic bottles. The challenge is ensuring that e-waste gets recycled without threatening public health.

Earlier this week, I took a tour of a small electronics recycler here that caters to people who want to be sure that their e-waste is handled responsibly, rather than be shipped to a destination with unknown or unverified practices. The center, operated by Metech Recycling, provided a peek into how everyday products find a … Read more

Think Corning's Gorilla Glass is the toughest around? Maybe not for long. A research team led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology has created a metallic glass that's not just tough, but also strong--a combination known as damage tolerance.

While most of us use toughness and strength interchangeably, they are actually mutually exclusive and, in most cases, inversely proportionate to one another. Building materials like bricks are strong in the sense that hitting them will not result in a change in shape. But once you apply enough force to create a shear line, they break.

Rubber tires, on the other hand, deform easily with relatively little energy, but are extremely tough as it takes much more force to rip the material to shreds.

The metallic glass, detailed in this week's issue of Nature Materials, is actually a micro-alloy made from a combination of palladium, a small fraction of silver, and a mixture of other metalloids. The researchers claim the material has shown itself in tests to have a combination of strength and toughness not previously seen in any other material. … Read more

I was never a fan of cassettes; they were the MP3s of their time. Neither format ever sounded good to me.

Prerecorded tapes from the record companies were the lowest of the low. True, they were less expensive than LPs in the '70s and '80s, but you could make much better-sounding cassettes yourself by dubbing LPs to cassette.

Cassettes were only slightly more durable than LPs and were definitely subject to wear. Also, while the cassette you made might sound decent enough on YOUR cassette deck, there was no guarantee it would sound OK on anybody else's machine (tape … Read more

China cut its first batch of rare earth export quotas for next year by more than one-tenth, in the face of a threat by the United States to complain to the World Trade Organization over the export limits.

China's Commerce Ministry allotted 14,446 metric tons of quotas to 31 companies, which was 11.4 percent less than the 16,304 metric tons it allocated to 22 companies in the first batch of 2010 quotas a year ago.

The ministry said in a short statement that it had added more producer companies to the quota list, but has cut … Read more