It’ll be a snap to identify gemstones once Robert Downs finishes his library of spectral fingerprints for all the Earth’s minerals. Downs is almost halfway there. So far, the associate professor of ...

The MIST team, from left to right, Yueyang Jiang, Kirsten Siebach, Gelu Costin and Eleanor Moreland (Photo credit: Linda Fries/Rice University). Identifying a mineral might sound straightforward: ...

"The key for identification of rock-forming minerals provides an efficient and systematic approach to identifying minerals in thin-section. It is structured in the form of a dichotomous key, ...