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Seventeen elements of the periodic table have taken on outsize importance because of their use in smartphones, electric vehicles, medical devices, and other technologies. They’re valued for their special chemistry, which gives them particular magnetic properties and other advantages. These traits come from the unique configuration of the elements’ valence electrons—the outer electrons commonly used in chemical bonds. In the rare earth elements, some of the valence electrons stay close to the atomic nucleus and tend not to interact with the atoms’ outside environment, and so they rarely form bonds. The result is that they have predictable, dependable chemical properties.

Humans have mined about 4.5 million metric tons of rare earth elements so far, and we know of only 90.9 million metric tons left on Earth. At today’s production rates, we will run out of these materials in 60 to 100 years. Efforts are underway, however, to find more deposits of the metals, which aren’t actually especially rare but are difficult to extract because they are usually found in low concentrations along with other elements.

Current mining methods are slow, energy-intensive, and highly damaging to the environment. They generate acidic and radioactive waste, and they leach toxic chemicals into the ground. “We have to figure out ways to do it better and cleaner,” says Justin Wilson, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He and his colleagues recently tested a new way to extract rare earth elements from recycled electronic waste. “I’m optimistic that we can collectively find solutions to these problems as long as the federal government remains committed to providing funding for this research,” Wilson notes.

WHAT ARE THE RARE EARTH ELEMENTS?

These chemicals are mostly the lanthanides, which occupy the second-to-last row of the periodic table, along with scandium and yttrium. Their unique properties arise largely from the configuration of the electrons in a sublevel called the 4f shell. “When I took freshman chemistry, no one ever talked about these elements; they were just the ones at the bottom of the periodic table,” Wilson says. Now their use in electronics “has put them in the spotlight.”

HOW MUCH HAS ALREADY BEEN MINED?

Most of the rare earth elements mined so far have come from China, which leads the world in the infrastructure and expertise to extract these minerals. The major U.S. source is the Mountain Pass deposit in southern California. Given the surging demand for the elements, however, countries around the world are actively looking for new stores of them.

HOW MUCH IS LEFT?

China, too, has the largest known global reserve of rare earth elements, followed by Brazil, India, and Australia. Given the race to discover new deposits, these figures could change. Many countries that had been content to let China lead in rare earth–resource mining before the recent tech boom are increasingly recognizing the importance of local options. This has been especially true in the U.S. since President Donald Trump imposed new tariffs on imports.

IT SEEMS LIKE THERE’S A LOT LEFT. SO WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

Rare earth elements are actually more abundant than precious metals such as platinum and gold. The challenge, however, is finding minable sources of them; they are often present in small amounts and difficult to separate from other elements. Extracting them is a laborious, multistep process

EXTRACTION

• Open-Pit Mining Approach: This technique involves removing ore from the ground, then transporting it to a leaching pond, where chemicals separate out the different metals. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: The toxic chemicals in the leaching pond can leak into groundwater and contaminate water supplies. The process also produces toxic waste.
• In Situ Leaching Approach: In this method, pipes pump chemicals directly into the ground to flush out rare earth elements. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: The chemicals are toxic and, as with open-pit mining, can contaminate groundwater. Both methods produce toxic dust, waste gas, and radioactive waste.

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Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., criticized the nationwide redistricting fight in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” arguing that the country is going through “a repeat of a history that led to some catastrophic consequences in our previous history.”

Clyburn was asked at the start of the interview whether he agreed with Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who opposed his state’s redistricting and argued that “if you fight fire with fire long enough, all you’re going to have left is ashes.”

“I agree with him entirely,” Clyburn said.

Clyburn pointed to the emergence of Jim Crow after the post-Civil War Reconstruction period ended, saying these racist laws and Supreme Court decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson “made a mockery of democracy.”

“That is what we are approaching today,” he added, asking: “Are we going to continue our pursuit of a more perfect union, or are we going to make a mockery out of this democracy?”

His comments come after the Supreme Court allowed Texas to use a new congressional district map, which could help Republicans gain five House seats in next year’s midterm elections. Texas’ move set off redistricting battles across the country, with state legislators on both sides of the aisle pushing to redraw maps to favor their party.

Separately, Clyburn responded to former first lady Michelle Obama’s comments last month, saying that the U.S. is not ready for a female president.

Asked whether he agreed with Obama, Clyburn said that she “is absolutely correct,” but argued that it did not mean we should stop trying.

“If you look at the history, we demonstrated that we were not ready,” Clyburn said. “These are incredible women who have run: Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and I think that we are getting there. That’s why we can’t afford to turn the clock back.”

He added that “just because it doesn’t seem that we are ready, doesn’t mean we should stop the pursuit.”

“My dad used to tell me all the time, ‘Son, the darkest part of the night is that moment just before dawn.’ And so we may be in a dark moment as it relates to women serving as president, but we may be in that moment just before dawn, where the woman will serve,” he continued. “And in order for that to happen, they have got to run.”

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Rep. James Clyburn

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Where Things Stand

• Boat strike: Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, accused the Pentagon of concealing video of a strike that killed two survivors of an attack on a vessel in the Caribbean because it is “very, very difficult to justify.” Mr. Smith told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s suggestion that releasing the video could “compromise sources and methods” rang hollow after videos of other strikes had been made public. “It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it,” Mr. Smith said. Read more ›

• Kennedy Center: Mr. Trump is scheduled to become the first president to host the Kennedy Center honors on Sunday night. Mr. Trump has largely taken over the institution, installing himself as chairman and personally approving the honorees. Read more ›

• Bessent’s holdings: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that he divested from his holdings of thousands of acres of North Dakota soybean farmland to comply with his federal ethics agreement. He drew criticism from ethics watchdogs for being slow to sell the properties, which posed potential conflicts of interest. Read more ›

Trump blasts a Democrat lawmaker for not switching parties after receiving a pardon.

President Trump on Sunday upbraided Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas, for not switching parties in his re-election bid after Mr. Trump pardoned him and his wife on bribery charges last week, saying Mr. Cuellar’s decision displayed a “lack of LOYALTY.”

Mr. Cuellar was indicted by a federal grand jury last year on charges that he and his wife had accepted roughly $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil company and a Mexican bank in exchange for promises that he would use his position in ways that would benefit Azerbaijan and the bank.

In a break from precedent, President Trump takes a starring role at the Kennedy Center Honors.

President Trump is slated to host the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday night in an event that will pay tribute to the actors Sylvester Stallone and Michael Crawford, the singers Gloria Gaynor and George Strait, and the band Kiss.

While past presidents have typically watched from a designated box in the opera house of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Mr. Trump will be the first president to host the event, putting his administration’s cultural takeover of Washington and its institutions on vivid display.

Democrats call for releasing classified video of deadly boat attacks.

Top Democrats called on Sunday for the release of classified video of the U.S. military’s first operation targeting a boat in the Caribbean in early September, an attack that has faced heavy scrutiny in part for its follow-up strike that killed two survivors.

Democrats and Republicans have offered starkly different descriptions of the video, which was seen by some members of Congress but has not been made public. Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said it was “simply not accurate” that the video of the Sept. 2 strike on the boat carrying 11 individuals showed the survivors trying to flip a capsized boat, rescue its cargo, and continue trafficking drugs, as Republicans in Congress have maintained.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not committed to releasing the full video of a strike that killed two survivors of an attack on a vessel in the Caribbean.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Postpartum depression descended on Kristina Leos like a heavy fog that separated her from everyone she loved. She could see her newborn baby girl, her two older kids, and her husband, but she felt like a ghost passing through their world. “I was going through the motions, but it was like I was looking down on my family,” she recalls.

Leos, 40, a nurse who lives in Midlothian, Tex., tried several different antidepressants and doses. None helped. She messaged a friend, anxious that she was unfit to be a mother. She even asked if they would take her new baby, Victoria. Although Leos never considered hurting her kids, there were times when she was driving home from work and wondered what it would be like to drive off a bridge. “I just had no fear of dying,” she says. “I didn’t care what happened.”

In December 2023, nine months after Leos gave birth to Victoria, her doctor told her they were running out of options. She was down to serious choices, including infusions of ketamine (a drug that alters the anatomy and activity of brain cells), electroconvulsive therapy, or admission to a psychiatric hospital.

Then Leos remembered seeing something on social media about a new drug specifically for postpartum depression. Unlike older antidepressants such as Prozac, this medication worked on brain chemicals that are particularly affected by pregnancy. She asked her doctor about it, and they decided to give it a try. Leos began the medication on New Year’s Day 2024. Three days later, her world shifted. “I was driving on the highway, and I could literally feel this huge cloud lifting over me,” she says. “And every day I got better and better.” The drug, called zuranolone and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2023, has since relieved depression in thousands of women.

This kind of help is needed desperately. For new mothers, the overall leading cause of death during the first year after childbirth is not bleeding or infection, according to one study encompassing 36 states. What kills more are mental health problems, which account for approximately 23 percent of maternal deaths in the country. These disorders include a lot of cases of postpartum depression. Yet fewer than half of the women who show signs of such illness are diagnosed, and even fewer receive any form of treatment.

Emerging research on the biology of postpartum depression shows that it is not like other severe mood disorders neurologically or biochemically. Rather, it is a result of dramatic changes in hormone levels that come with pregnancy and childbirth. Studies have shown that levels of progesterone and a related hormone, allopregnanolone, rise significantly during pregnancy. Then the levels drop sharply after delivery. Some women are particularly sensitive to this drop, which can disrupt the brain circuitry that regulates mood, leaving them unable to effectively deal with the stresses of motherhood. Zuranolone is designed to offset that drop-off.

Growing knowledge of the neurobiology of postpartum depression is also pointing toward methods for earlier and more reliable detection. Many experts hope that identifying biomarkers that predict which women will develop the condition, as well as the introduction of the new medication, will take the stigma away from the illness and stop both health-care workers and patients from viewing it as a sign of personal weakness or poor parenting. “It is a serious mental illness,” says Kristina Deligiannidis, a reproductive psychiatrist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health in New York State. “We just want to empower women to seek treatment.”

Challenges do remain. The price tag for the two-week course of zuranolone is nearly $16,000, raising concerns about how insurance coverage and looming Medicaid-eligibility cuts could restrict access, especially because Medicaid covers about 40 percent of births in the U.S., and researchers are still trying to figure out why the pill doesn’t work for everyone. “Not every single person that takes it is going to have a fabulous remission of their symptoms,” says Samantha Meltzer-Brody, a psychiatrist and founder of the perinatal psychiatry program at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. Still, she views the medication as a major milestone. “It can work remarkably well for more than half of people, and it’s rapid-acting,” she says. “That’s a game changer.”

For centuries, medicine has struggled to fully grasp the causes and consequences of postpartum depression. Descriptions go as far back as ancient Greece: physicians wrote about women who showed signs of a depressed mood, and even psychosis, after childbirth. During the Middle Ages, new mothers with depressive symptoms were often believed to be possessed by demons or suffering from an imbalance of bile or other body fluids. Postpartum mood disturbances have also been grouped into vague or broad diagnoses such as melancholia, mania, or neurosis, which did little to help patients.

Even in modern times, such distress is often dismissed as “baby blues”—the mood swings that affect most new moms but typically resolve within a couple of weeks. But postpartum depression is more intense and long-lasting. It can cause profound sadness and despair, disrupting the crucial bond between mother and child, and its consequences can affect multiple generations. Every yea,r approximately 500,000 women in the U.S. experience the condition. Approximately 30 percent of women with postpartum depression continue to experience symptoms one year after giving birth. For some, these problems can persist for as long as 11 years.

Yet postpartum depression is not officially recognized as a standalone illness. It did not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the so-called bible of psychiatry, until 1994. Even then it was listed as a subtype of major depression. In the most recent major edition, DSM-5, released in 2013, it is still subsumed under the “major depression” label, with the added phrase “with peripartum onset.” These additional three words reflect evidence that almost half of women develop symptoms during pregnancy, not just after.

Because postpartum depression has been lumped in with major depression, the two have often been treated the same way. Therapy has relied on traditional antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. This approach is rooted in the idea that depression stems from low levels of chemical messengers such as serotonin and norepinephrine that help to govern mood. These antidepressants aim to boost levels of these messengers in the brain.

Not everyone who takes zuranolone is going to have a fabulous remission. Still, it works well for more than half the people. That’s a game-changer.

But in recent decades, the research community has recognized that focusing only on these chemical imbalances leaves out other factors that may underlie postpartum depression—including genetics, inflammation, hormonal changes, and neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt and form new connections.

Some scientists suspected that fluctuations in hormones such as estrogen and progesterone—called neurosteroids because they act in the brain—played an important role. Yet when research groups started examining the levels of various hormones and neurosteroids, they did not see consistent differences that explained why some new mothers developed depression, and others did not.

Then, about 17 years ago, Jamie Maguire, a neuroscientist now at Tufts University, stumbled on some unusual behavior in mice that had just given birth, and her observation helped to connect the dots. At the time, Maguire was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying an ailment called catamenial epilepsy, in which brain seizures become more frequent or more severe during certain phases of the menstrual cycle. She was interested in how neurosteroids might protect against these seizures. Some neurosteroids have been shown to dampen brain activity by strengthening certain effects of a neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. This chemical can inhibit neurons, making them less likely to fire. Maguire genetically engineered mice to have altered receptors for GABA on their neurons, making it hard for them to react to the chemical. Without this “brake” on neural activity, the mice’s brains became hyperexcitable. That extreme state can contribute to seizures.

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More than half of the nation’s 623,218 bridges are showing visible signs of deterioration—and now, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) have demonstrated a powerful, cost-effective way to extend their lifespan using 3D printing technology.

This breakthrough comes at a crucial time. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2025 Report Card, 49.1% of U.S. bridges are in “fair” condition, while 6.8% are rated “poor.” The price tag to repair them? Over $191 billion—and that number keeps rising.

A Nationwide Crisis on Our Roads

“Anytime you drive, you go under or over a corroded bridge,” says Simos Gerasimidis, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMass Amherst and former MIT visiting professor. “They are everywhere… their condition often shows significant deterioration. We know the numbers.”

And the numbers don’t lie:

• 623,218 bridges nationwide
• 49.1% fair condition
• 6.8% poor condition
• $191+ billion in projected repair costs

Traditional repairs are expensive, highly disruptive, and often require long-term lane closures—something cities and transportation departments are eager to avoid.

Cold Spray: A 3D Printing Method Reinventing Bridge Repair

The research team turned to cold spray technology, a specialized form of additive manufacturing that deposits metal at high velocity without melting it. This allows steel to bond to corroded bridge sections in the field, in real time, with no major disassembly required.

How Cold Spray Works

1. Fine powdered steel is loaded into a specialized applicator
2. Heated, compressed gas accelerates the particles to supersonic speed
3. The particles strike the corroded beam surface
4. The impact bonds steel to steel—layer by layer—like a metal 3D printer
5. The technician passes the applicator repeatedly, restoring thickness and strength

Because the steel is never melted, the repair is safer, faster, and more structurally consistent than many conventional welding or replacement methods.

Real-World Proof: A Massachusetts Bridge Gets Reinforced

Last month, engineers performed a proof-of-concept repair on a small corroded section of a bridge in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

The cold spray method:

• Restored missing material
• Reduced corrosion-related vulnerabilities
• Reinforced structural beams
• Caused minimal traffic disruption
• Delivered results at a fraction of traditional repair costs

This demonstration shows that cold spray has the potential to extend the life of thousands of aging bridges—buying cities time and reducing the financial burden of full replacements.

The Future of Infrastructure Repair

Cold spray 3D printing could transform how we maintain transportation networks:

• Rapid field restoration without removing beams
• Lower repair costs, especially for widespread corrosion
• Safer for workers—no high-heat welding
• Sustainability benefits through structural life extension

• Scalable for nationwide adoption

With more than half of America’s bridges in declining condition, this technology introduces a practical, scalable roadmap for infrastructure resilience.

UMass Amherst and MIT’s work may soon influence state and federal repair strategies—ushering in a new era where 3D printing is deployed directly on aging structures to keep roads safe and open.

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Cold spray metal deposition strengthens a deteriorated steel bridge beam with layered 3D-printed metal. Image for illustration only.

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