China's rare earth minerals monopoly

At mines like this one in Jiangxi Province, China produces 95 percent of the world's rare-earth minerals, a key resource for the future of energy. With tongue-twisting names like dysprosium, yttrium, and neodymium, these 17 metals are found in products ranging from cell phones and computers to medical devices and jet engines. They play an important role in the coatings, magnets, and phosphors used in green technology, such as photovoltaic thin film panels, fluorescent lighting, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. On March 13, the United States, Japan, and European Union filed a World Trade Organization complaint against China for restricting exports of these minerals and driving up prices. As trade officials try to find a resolution, scientists around the world are searching for substitutes. Sometimes, a fish out of water doesn't feel like a fish out of water—at least if it's a Pacific leaping blenny (pictured). For the first time, scientists have closely studied the land-dwelling fish, which hops about the rocky coastlines of Micronesia The new study revealed that the "walking" fish are amazingly agile on land, where they engage in complex social and courtship behaviors, study leader Terry Ord, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said by email. But Ord and colleagues also found that the landlubbers can forage, court, and mate—basically take care of all their blenny business—only during the few short hours of midtide. That's when the water level is high enough to keep the fish's skin wet but the waves aren't strong enough to carry the animals out to sea. The blennies, which breathe through their gills and partly through their skin, will suffocate if they completely dry out. So "while these fish are very good at living on land ... they are nevertheless very constrained by their evolutionary history," noted Ord, whose study appeared in July in the journal Ethology. "That is, at the end of the day, they are still fish, and fish are more suited to life in water, not on land."