Every year, the world consumes around 50 billion tonnes of sand, gravel and crushed stone. The astonishing scale of this demand is hard to comprehend—12.5 million Olympic sized swimming pools per year ...

Despite vast deserts, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours rely on imported construction-grade sand to meet the demands of mega-projects like NEOM and the Burj Khalifa. Desert sand’s smooth grains are ...

Anyone stepping barefoot across a hot beach knows sand stores heat. A University of Dayton researcher is working on extracting and storing heat from that sand and other sand-like materials, which ...