Colorado has the two US mines dedicated to molybdenum. Molybdenum is a metal used mainly as an alloying agent in cast iron, steel and superalloys. Henderson is an underground mine that opened in 1976. The ore travels to the mill on a conveyor 15 miles long, and ten of those…
How DJI achieves its exceptional margins, from a teardown of two popular drones.
One Army plant in Kingsport, Tennessee, is the only US manufacturer of the military explosives RDX and HMX. The plant, Holston, supplies most of the explosives used in US bombs, missiles and artillery shells. In 1980 five US plants could make about 119 million pounds of RDX a…
These small, modular facilities are leveraging robotics, additive manufacturing and advanced technologies to alleviate long lead times for parts and components.
As the Trump administration scrambles to increase the production of munitions, these special screws are expensive and hard to source.
Global container shipping reliability is at its lowest level for four years, as the congestion in Asia continues to disrupt liner operations. According to Sea-Intelligence, schedule reliability fell by 5.9 percentage points month on month in August, to 49.9%, marking the second…
This global shipbuilding industry’s concentration inside the First Island Chain is one of the most underdiscussed systematic risks to the global economy.
Four in five air freight quotes on cargo.one now go out without human review. Here are the six patterns that build forwarder trust in AI quoting.
We have run enough of these deployments to see the same six patterns emerge.
Food prices today for onions, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, avocados and strawberries: USDA wholesale and shipping point quotes with price charts, change against a year earlier, grocery ad prices by region and daily updates. Latest report 18 Sep 2026.
Two Japanese companies control roughly half the market for the mechanism that lets robots move, and Chinese suppliers are closing in fast.
Look into how gas turbines work, the challenges, the manufacturing process, and the supply chain involved.
Three countries mine about 85% of the world's antimony: China, Russia and Tajikistan. The United States imports 91% of what it uses, more than half of it from China, which banned antimony exports to the US in December 2024. The metal goes into ammunition, lead-acid batteries and…
Why Margins Collapse Where Product Variety Explodes, And How Assembly Can Win Them Back
In much of the West, the importance of these close relationships was lost, with competitive bidding and more transactional relationships becoming the norm.
In this model, vertical integration is not about owning everything. It is about owning the layers of the stack where outsourcing would slow learning, limit final integration or affect product performance.
One 15-barge tow on the lower Mississippi holds about 875,000 bushels of grain, the load of almost 216 rail cars or 1,000 trucks. Source: USDA Agricultural Marketing Service: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/ReliableWaterwaySystem042025.pdf
Nobody stops the barrels now.
The notion that the U.S.'s large titanium castings capability is concentrated in one 70-mile corridor in Oregon is a production risk scarier than the Bigfoot himself
Here’s a list of every food item that faced a recall in August.
Retailers need to stop owning so much inventory risk and start operating more like platforms.
There’s a good chance the cod on your child’s plate has been around the world and back. Not that you’d learn any of that from the label...
America's biggest egg company can't set the price of a single egg, which is the whole story, in both directions.
Eggs.org is the home of the Egg Clearinghouse,
It is a clearing mechanism for the slack in the system, and it is tiny.
General Dynamics opened a Texas factory to churn out artillery shells for Ukraine, but the machines kept breaking. Robot arms smashed into things. Hunks of metal crashed to the floor. There was even a real-life dumpster fire.
Speaking of IKEA, the IKEA complexity index by Greg Technology is a catalog of 20,000 products ranked by how long they take to build. When you get a PAX corner wardrobe, prepare for a manual in 16 …
How do we get helium? And what do we use it for?
The Geopolitics of Black Sludge Processing
The first new U.S. primary smelter since 1980. What it is, how it works, and where its inputs come from.
Spies, war, industrial subterfuge and secret recipes. And it all really happened. Honestly, what more could you ask for?
The unseen infrastructure of chipmaking
The new ground transportation offering expands the company’s hazardous materials network as battery production and demand continue to grow.
Home Depot has been on a building and acquisitions spree, rapidly taking over a half-dozen logistics companies. Is it also creating an opportunity for organized labor?
Earlier this spring, AMD, Broadcom, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI formed the Optical ...
The decision to use slow-and-wide is an energy-per-bit argument.
Photonic integration has evolved through three manufacturing eras
Every robot and drone runs on actuators — and China makes 90% of them. Inside the American startups racing to win back the motors the U.S. forgot how to build.
A deep dive from Contrary Research.
The lost art and Turbine economics
I’m a big fan of focusing on things that are within my control. This article is about real actions we can take while we’re waiting for lawmakers to get their shit together. @andrewmccalip, @zanehengsperger, and others have
GE killed their biggest competitor. Russia lost another. A Nebraska family kept making the component nobody thinks about, and now they basically own the market.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are being cajoled into spending billions more on the military budget need to read this first
A Coming Supply Chain Disruption for Global AI Infrastructure
Making all that whey is complicated.
The candy maker scrapped its volume-for-price playbook and adopted a collaborative approach to sharing the pain.
How Britain built a system where cargo-dependent nations pay rent forever. And why that system is finally cracking.
Costco is built different
We look at reference classes, factory buildout timelines, and upstream component supply to estimate plausible production rates for humanoids, quadrupeds, robotic arms, wheeled robots, and drones.
Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
We can look at the relative complexity of different US refineries using the Nelson Complexity Index, which is intended to measure how complex a refinery is
average complexity index was 8.7
Protolabs, Xometry, Fictiv and Jiga Deep Dive
Why the rebuild depends on metallurgy, apprenticeship, and one mill in Pennsylvania.
Belgium’s top customs official says main problem is that many products do not meet EU standards.