{"id":100178,"date":"2019-12-26T13:25:33","date_gmt":"2019-12-26T21:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/scientists-have-officially-found-a-mineral-never-before-seen-in-nature"},"modified":"2019-12-26T13:25:33","modified_gmt":"2019-12-26T21:25:33","slug":"scientists-have-officially-found-a-mineral-never-before-seen-in-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/scientists-have-officially-found-a-mineral-never-before-seen-in-nature","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Have Officially Found a Mineral Never Before Seen in Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-have-officially-found-a-mineral-never-before-seen-in-nature3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush town. In the old days, Wedderburn was a hotspot for prospectors \u2013 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/australian-man-unearths-2-7kg-gold-nugget-worth-135k\">it occasionally still is<\/a> \u2013 but nobody there had ever seen a nugget quite like this one.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lpi.usra.edu\/meteor\/metbull.php?code=24229\">Wedderburn meteorite<\/a>, found just north-east of the town in 1951, was a small 210-gram chunk of strange-looking space rock that fell out of the sky. For decades, scientists have been trying to decipher its secrets, and researchers just decoded another.<\/p>\n<p>In a study published in August this year, led by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.its.caltech.edu\/~chima\/\">Caltech mineralogist Chi Ma<\/a>, scientists analysed the Wedderburn meteorite and verified the first natural occurrence of what they call \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/www.degruyter.com\/view\/j\/ammin.2019.104.issue-9\/am-2019-7102\/am-2019-7102.xml\">edscottite<\/a>\u2019: a rare form of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cementite\">iron-carbide mineral<\/a> that\u2019s never been found in nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush town. In the old days, Wedderburn was a hotspot for prospectors \u2013 it occasionally still is \u2013 but nobody there had ever seen a nugget quite like this one. The Wedderburn meteorite, found just north-east of the town in 1951, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}