Rare earth elements sustain the Information Age, and securing a supply of these metals has become a matter of national and ...

It resists the flow of electrons by pushing back harder when they flow faster. There’s a mechanical element that behaves in exactly the same way — the dashpot or damper.

But since the 4f-subshell contains seven orbitals, and most rare earths contain fewer than 14 f-electrons, the elements tend to have multiple orbitals with just one electron.

The electronic device in this case is the memristor—a resistor with memory and one of the four fundamental electronic elements, along with resistors, inductors and capacitors. Memristors are still ...

Up until today, the circuit element had only been described in a series of mathematical equations written by Leon Chua, who in 1971 was an engineering student studying non-linear circuits.