Why America’s best fighter jets are being made with deadweight

Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy, and Jahara Matisek, senior fellow at Payne, authored this column focused on the role gallium plays in radars used by the U.S. Department of Defense.
April 27, 2026

Data centers are gobbling up a resource — but not the one you think

Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy, co-authors this article that notes data centers use a lot of water to cool their equipment.
March 25, 2026

Trump’s U.S. mining push has a big problem

Elizabeth Holley, associate professor of mining engineering, and Bill Zisch, the J. Steven Whisler Head of Mining Engineering Endowed Chair, noted there are not enough mining engineering graduates to satisfy current domestic demand.
February 20, 2026

Here’s a source for critical minerals — hiding in plain sight

Elizabeth Holley, associate professor of mining engineering, and Priscilla Nelson, professor of mining engineering, co-authored this guest column on their study that revealed the U.S. could obtain nearly all the critical minerals it needs through the re-processing of mine waste.
September 1, 2025

The most promising ways to destroy ‘forever chemicals’

Christopher Higgins, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Colorado School of Mines, discusses emerging technologies aimed at breaking down PFAS, or "forever chemicals," highlighting the global research efforts to effectively eliminate ....
May 13, 2025

Land under the country’s largest cities is sinking. Here’s where — and why.

Pejman Tahmasebi, associate professor of petroleum engineering, discusses how detailed mapping of land subsidence can inform groundwater management and urban planning to mitigate infrastructure risks.
May 8, 2025

What are Ukraine's critical minerals actually worth? No one knows.

Rod Eggert, deputy director of the Critical Materials Innovation Hub at Mines, is quoted in this article examining Ukraine's critical minerals. “Ukraine has significant mineral potential, but how large that potential is, we simply don’t know,” said Eggert,
February 28, 2025

La Niña is coming. Here’s how it could change the weather.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how this La Niña intersects with the generally very warm global oceans,” said Nathan Lenssen, a climate scientist at the Colorado School of Mines and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “We’re in really ....
July 11, 2024

Unleash the deep sea robots? A quandary as EV makers hunt for metals

“It is so uncertain where things are going,” said Ian Lange, director of the mineral and energy economics program at Colorado School of Mines. “There are a lot of changes that can still happen. It is hard to call anything in a battery right now ....
April 5, 2023

Panic over spy balloon echoes misguided alarm over Sputnik

Kenneth Osgood, professor of history at Colorado School of Mines, writes about the recent Chinese spy balloon and how the reaction to it is similar to the 1957 launch of Soviet satellite Sputnik.
February 13, 2023