Thorin Resources and Penn State’s Materials Research Institute

Image of a mining field

Thorin Resources owns two historic gold, silver and base-metal hard-rock mines in Ouray, Colorado. Preliminary work indicated that historic tailings and waste rock may contain recoverable platinum-group metals, rare earth elements and other critical minerals. Eric Keiter, chairman of the board of Thorin Resources, is a graduate of Penn State’s College of Science.

What brought Thorin Resources to Penn State’s Materials Research Institute, and what capabilities or expertise made MRI the right fit for the work you needed to accomplish?

$3.6M NIH grant funds study of smart lighting for dementia symptoms and sleep

Side-by-side photo of Ying-Ling Jao and Julian Wang

A team from Penn State’s Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing and College of Engineering will test a smart lighting system in Pennsylvania nursing homes

Penn State researchers have received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant expected to provide about $3.6 million over five years to test whether a smart lighting system can improve sleep and behavioral and psychological symptoms among nursing home residents living with dementia.

Tiny wrinkles bend physics to change how electricity moves through graphene

Artist illustration of electricity moving across a curved sheet of graphene

Tiny wrinkles could reveal new behaviors in graphene, an exceptionally strong, conductive and thin material used in batteries, computer chips and other electronics. According to a new study published in Advanced Materials, small bends in graphene’s two-dimensional (2D), or one-atom-thick, structure can change the material’s electrical properties.