When Pesticide Becomes Luxury. ARBOK-REPEEL
Hundreds of farms in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh spray their rice with cola. Not as a stunt — as a budget decision. 1.5 L of cola costs $0.36…
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Research updates and technology notes
Published ARBOK articles, research notes, portfolio updates and institutional announcements.
55posts
ARBOK TEGA-TiO2: the photocatalyst you dont have to fish back out
TiO2 is the world’s most common photocatalyst for cleaning water and air of organics, NOx and volatile compounds. It is universal, but it carries a systemic problem. The…
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ARBOK TEGA-ZnO: the sensor that doesn’t need a battery
ZnO is one of the best piezoelectric materials for nanogenerators: mechanical strain — vibration, a footstep, airflow — converts directly into electrical charge, with no battery and no…
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ARBOK TEGA-Si: a new type of anode
Silicon gives a lithium-ion anode ten times more capacity than graphite — and for just as many years the industry has been unable to use it properly: on…
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Lake Balaton can be cleaned
Balaton is a unique lake, the largest in Central Europe. A stunning place: formed tectonically about 15,000–17,000 years ago, a trough 79 km long and 1.2–12.4 km wide.…
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Iodine Without a Mine: The Element Recovered Only From Water, and Why Ordinary Produced Water Is Not Used
Abstract Iodine is the only element of industrial significance that humanity does not mine from ore. One deposit type in the world – the Chilean caliche of the…
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Uranium in the Pipe: The Element the United States Recovered from Phosphoric Acid for 23 Years and Then Abandoned
Abstract Uranium recovery from wet-process phosphoric acid is the only mature industrial route to a critical raw material that was developed to commercial scale, operated for more than…
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Erbium: The Optical Backbone and the Separation Bottleneck
Abstract Erbium is the material foundation of long-haul optical communication. Roughly 40% of world demand goes into erbium-doped fibre amplifiers (EDFA), where the Er³⁺ ion in a silica…
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LUTETIUM. $150 M of raw material a year worldwide. A $2 bn cancer drug stands on it.
❌ Origin: there is no lutetium mine. It is purely a by-product of rare earth separation, and the world gets about 10 t of oxide a year at…
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