Michael Forrest visited the Araxá niobium mine in Brazil to learn about the metal's production. Current production capacity is around 80,000t. Of this, 70,000t is of standard grade ferro-niobium, 4,000t is of high purity oxide, 3,000t of vacuum grade ferro-niobium or nickel niobium, 300t of optical grade oxide and 210t of pure niobium.

Nanotechnology development in the UK is at a critical phase. The Chairman of the Institute's Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology Group takes a look at the industry and its goals for the future.

The most recent IOM3 Commodity Day focused on copper, covering the market’s price drivers and the long and short-term prospects for consumption and supply, environmental concerns, pryometallurgical extraction, acid leaching, smelting and exploration.

Spintronics has made a major impact on daily life by driving increases in hard drive information storage density over the last decade. However, the discipline has not yet influenced traditional information processing, where circuits of silicon transistors dominate.

Techniques to image materials at the micron scale and below include scanning and transmission electron microscopes (SEM and TEM) and scanning probe microscopes (SPM). The dynamical behaviour of nano-objects is quite different from those of ‘bulk’ materials. The development of SPM probes for electron microscopes is enabling real-time testing of nanovolumes of material, and is providing the opportunity to make movies of nanomaterials in motion.

Sophisticated technologies are used to discover new drugs, which result in a broad variety of active compounds with high specificity and potency. These drugs need to reach the right place (cell or tissue) in the body, in an adequate concentration and for a specific time period, to have the desired therapeutic effect.