Minerals

Dirk Vanhooymissen's eyes sparkle as he describes the agreement that his company, Tenke Fungurume Mining, has signed with this nation's new government. It covers a parcel--near the southeastern city of Lubumbashi, amid miles of temperate highland savannas--that contains some of the richest copper and cobalt deposits in the world. Annual copper production at the site is expected to reach 400,000 tons; the company hopes to pull out close to 30,000 tons of cobalt.

Sixty miles off the coast stands a ghostly forest like no other in the world. On wind-swept San Miguel Island, the western-most island in the Channel Islands National Park, is the caliche forest, an ancient arrangement of twisted white stalks that took 10,000 years to grow. Hardly the verdant and teeming scene one might imagine, this forest instead is reminiscent of a chalky graveyard littered with skeletal shapes, the casts of trees that disappeared eons ago.

Fear of a shortage of rare-earth metals used in high-tech military and industrial products has spawned global efforts to reopen abandoned mines, including the formidable Mountain Pass Mine in California's Mojave Desert. Discovered in the 1940s by uranium prospectors, Mountain Pass contains an array of rare earths, including cerium and lanthanum, in concentrations almost double those found at the world's biggest rare-earth mine, China's Bayan Obo. "You're looking at the greatest rare-earth deposit in the world," says operations manager John Benfield as he ushers a visitor around the 2,200-acre site 60 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

WASHINGTON - Because of a law passed during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, the federal government does not collect royalties from gold, silver, copper and other minerals extracted from public land, a source of revenue that could potentially generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the federal budget, government auditors reported Wednesday. Although the government collects billions of dollars in royalties from fossil fuels extracted from federal lands and waters, it does not even collect information from hard-rock mine operators about the amount or value of the minerals they take from public land because there are no royalty requirements, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office.

President and Chief Executive John Boreta said he hoped that negotiations with lenders would keep the Oakland-based company "out of the courts." The firm, which has suffered losses in the last three years as a result of the slump in oil drilling, said it might dispose of its minerals and agricultural businesses along with some drilling rigs. The company hasn't paid any debt obligations since mid-May and faces delisting from the New York Stock Exchange.

NASA's Curiosity rover has bitten into Martian turf at a site called Rocknest and revealed soil remarkably akin to volcanic soils on Earth, scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Tuesday. Nearing the end of its third month roving the Red Planet, the "bites" into the Rocknest dune mark the Mars Science Laboratory rover's first result from its chemistry and mineralogy instrument -- CheMin for short -- which bombards soil samples with X-rays to reveal their mineral composition and abundance.

Sigmund Miller, author of "LifeSpan Plus," offers the following advice on taking vitamin-mineral supplements: Be sure to inform your doctor. Certain vitamins interfere with the action of medications. L-dopa, used to treat Parkinson's disease, is reduced by taking Vitamin B-6. Take your supplements with or shortly after a meal. This ensures a higher rate of absorption of the micronutrients. Never gulp down a handful of pills with a glass of water and think of this as a meal.