Here’s What to Know About Rare Earth Minerals and Renewable Energy

In 1886, a French chemist dissolved holmium oxide in acid. Then, he added ammonia. Toiling over the marble slab of his fireplace, he repeated the procedure dozens of times.Finally, voilà: He’d extracted a new element.More than a century later, Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s painstaking discovery — which he named dysprosium, from the Greek for “hard to get” — is a crucial ingredient in the powerful magnets used…