When news broke late last month that an unidentified bright blue mineral had been found in Adventure Mining Company’s historic Upper Peninsula copper mine, many people made speculations on social ...

It’ll be a snap to identify gemstones once Robert Downs finishes his library of spectral fingerprints for all the Earth’s minerals. Downs is almost halfway there. So far, the associate professor of ...

Identifying a mineral might sound straightforward: Analyze its chemistry, compare it to known minerals and voilà. But for geologists, this process can be a time-consuming puzzle requiring specialized ...