Rice University scientists launch powerful new online tool to streamline mineral identification
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 24-Dec-2025 12:11 ET (24-Dec-2025 17:11 GMT/UTC)
Identifying a mineral might sound straightforward: analyze its chemistry, compare it to known minerals and voilà. But for geologists, this process can be a time-consuming puzzle requiring specialized expertise and a lot of manual calculation. Now, a team of researchers at Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences has developed MIST — Mineral Identification by Stoichiometry — the first online tool capable of automatically identifying hundreds of different mineral species from their chemical composition using a carefully designed rules-based algorithm.
For the first time, astrophysicists detected a supernova embedded in a wind rich with silicon, sulfur and argon. Observations suggest the massive star lost its outer hydrogen and helium layers long before exploding. Discovery offers direct evidence of the long-theorized inner shell structure of massive stars.
Astronomers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a vast and expanding bubble of gas and dust surrounding a red supergiant star – the largest structure of its kind ever seen in the Milky Way. The bubble, which contains as much mass as the Sun, was blown out in a mysterious stellar eruption around 4000 years ago. Why the star survived such a powerful event is a puzzle, the scientists say.
The new results are published in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the team was led by Mark Siebert, Chalmers, Sweden. Using the ALMA radio telescope in Chile, the researchers observed the star DFK 52 – a red supergiant similar to the well-known star Betelgeuse.