Rare Earth Elements

Rare-earth elements are hidden inside nearly every piece of modern technology - your phone, electric vehicles, fighter jets. They aren't scarce in number. They're scarce because pulling them apart is one of the hardest problems in chemistry, and the United States depends almost entirely on other countries to do it. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists are borrowing a solution nature spent millions of years perfecting - and inventing new materials that could make overlooked elements suddenly valuable - to rebuild a domestic supply chain from the ground up. Guests featured (in order of appearance): Scott McCall - Materials Physicist and Emeritus Actinide and Lanthanide Science Group Leader, LLNL Dan Park - Synthetic Biology Group Leader, Biosciences and Biotechnology Division, LLNL -- Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch. Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Matthew Powell. Script by Levi Hanusch. Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell. Narrated by Matthew Powell. Brought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.