US Patent Issued to Georgia State University Research Foundation on Oct. 28 for "Identifying and extracting rare earth elements from mining operations" (Georgia Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 28 -- United States Patent no. 12,454,739, issued on Oct. 28, was assigned to Georgia State University Research Foundation (Atlanta).

"Identifying and extracting rare earth elements from mining operations" was invented by W. Crawford Elliott (Atlanta) and David Shafer (Atlanta).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Described herein are technologies for bauxite or kaolin mining operations. A detector is used to detect the presence of a pathfinder element or radioactivity indicating a presence of a rare-earth element. Once the pathfinder element or radioactivity is detected, the mined material is segregated from material mined in which a pathfinder element or radioactivity was not...