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China has already won the materials war. Andrew Barron, one of the top materials experts on the planet, didnt mince words when I interviewed him for a documentary on the dangers of our civilizations dependency on China’s quasi-monopoly of rare earth minerals. If the world does not stop depending on China’s supply of rare earths, he warned two years ago, we could face an economic collapse in just a few decades. It sounds like a dystopian sci-fi movie, but this potentially catastrophic scenario began this week for the United States, when Xi Jinpings government issued an immediate suspension of rare earth mineral and magnet exports, retaliating against President Trumps trade policies. This isnt just a supply chain hiccupits a geopolitical detonation with direct consequences to the economy and all of our lives. China controls 69% of global rare earth mining and a staggering 8590% of refining and processing, the complex alchemy that transforms raw ore into the materials that make absolutely everything that is crucial to our everyday lives, from your electric toothbrush to phone to computer to your electric car to the servers that make everything run. If it beeps, it depends on these minerals. And without Chinas processing dominance, even minerals mined elsewhere are functionally useless. Now export licenses have been frozen on samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium, which are used to make the powerful magnets in many of the electric motors that are crucial in electric vehicles, robots, satellites, missiles, and drones. Beijing has also banned the export of the magnets themselves (they produce 90% of the rare earth magnets globally). And this is just a warning shot with very serious effects for big industries, especially the defense sector. If China wanted, it could also ban lithium exports (it controls approximately 67% of the world’s refining capacity) and batteries, of which it controls (80% of the world’s production). Right now, you can bet that many executives in industries from Detroit to Dresden are staring into the abyss thinking about the possibility of further escalation. How did we get here? This chokehold isnt accidental. For decades, China has weaponized state subsidies, environmental deregulation, and strategic overseas investments to corner the market. As the U.S. shuttered Nevada’s Mountain Pass in 2002, its last major rare earth mine (later revived in 2017 by MP Materials, the U.S.’s only rare earth materials producer), China secured major rare earth mineral mines all around the world, from Chile and Bolivias lithium to cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Theyve essentially monopolized the entire [rare earth minerals] supply chain, Barron says. China decides who gets whatand when. Even partnerships with allies will falter if Jinping decided to escalate the crisis. Australia mines lithium, but lacks refining capacity; South Koreas LG Chem produces batteries but depends on Chinese graphite. And there will be a huge problem with magnets, too: Neodymium magnets are in almost every machine around us. Without it, everything from cars to wind turbines stop working. Beijing controls 80% of this metal. The rare earth domino effect So, yes, this export freeze will disrupt the U.S. economy. But further escalation would practically halt everything. in a big way. Heres how: 1. Automotive Japanese firms like Toyota and Honda stockpile rare earth magnets, but most global automakers lack reserves. A six-month magnet shortage could halt 80% of global EV production, an estimated 5.6 million vehicles lost, costing automakers about $150 billion in lost revenue. Hybrid vehicles, dependent on lanthanum in nickel-metal hydride batteries, face similar delays. These setbacks risk prolonging fossil fuel reliance and derailing climate goals. As for batteries, here in the U.S., Tesla, Ford, and GM rely on Chinese-refined lithium or Chinese-made batteries, while 80% of the worlds cobaltcritical for high-performance batteriesis controlled by Chinese companies. As Ho-Yin Mak, associate professor in Operations & Information Management at Georgetown University, notes: You cant build an EV ecosystem overnight when China owns the blueprint. 2. Tech & semiconductors Apples iPhone depends on batteries for power and neodymium for haptic feedback and speakers, just like many gadgets you have in your home. Western Digital and Seagate require rare earths for hard drive read/write headscritical for data storage. And lets not forget chips: semiconductor manufacturing, reliant on europium and terbium for etching. 3. Renewable energy To give you an idea on how dependent we are on Chinese rare earths for energy, a typical 3-megawatt GE wind turbine requires 2 tons of rare earths. The U.S. aims to deploy 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, but a magnet shortage could delay 50% of planned capacity. Existing turbines will face maintenance crises. Replacement parts for aging installations, like those in Texass onshore farms, could take years to source. Solar panel production, dependent on terbium and europium for photovoltaic cells, faces similar bottlenecks. 4. Defense This is where the current ban really impacts the U.S. The Pentagon will definitely not like the halt. It has warned that delays in sourcing these materials could compromise national security. Almost every airplane and complex weapons systems out there depend on rare earth minerals. As Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz write for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the rare earth elements banned by China are crucial for a range of defense technologies, including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles radar systems, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs. They note that one F-35 fighter jet alone uses over 900 pounds of these materials, the Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds, and a Virginia-class submarine uses around 9,200 pounds. These three weapons are cornerstones of the U.S. superiority. 5. Healthcare Siemens Healthineers MRI machines rely on samarium-cobalt magnets for imaging. Shortages will delay new machines and compromise the supply of replacement parts for maintenance. This will in return spike costs all across the healthcare system, delay diagnostics, and strain healthcare systems. 6. Consumer goods From headphones like your Apple AirPods or Boses noise-canceling headphones to Philips Sonicare toothbrushes, gadets all use rare earth-dependent motors. Even low-cost electronics, like Walmart earbuds, are at risk. 7. Heavy industryABBs industrial robots and Fanucs CNC machines require rare earths for precision. A shortage could disrupt global manufacturing, triggering layoffs and inflation. No escape The worst news is that the U.S. has no quick fixes for any of this. MP Materials’ stock skyrocketed yesterday because it’s the only company that has some capacity to process these rare earth materials in the U.S. It launched a magnet production facility this year in Texas, but thats a Band-Aid compared to the needs the industry faces. As Baskaran and Schwartz note, MP Materials will only be producing 1,000 tons of neodymium-boron-iron (NdFeB) magnets by the end of 2025. That is less than 1 percent of the 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets China produced in 2018. Still, the fact remains that the entire U.S. defense industry depends on this company right now. In 2022, the Pentagon awarded MP Materials a $35M contract to build new rare earth minerals processing facilities, but now it will most likely pour a lot more than that into it to accelerate its growth. It’s the only hope to provide the Pentagon’s military complex and the EV car industry with enough material any time soon. According to analysts, the company is “up to the challenge.” If China decided to further tighten the screws on the U.S., it is in an even worse position. The Trump administration could expedite partnerships with Korean battery makers like LG Chem, but scaling production takes years. And again, South Korea depends on China, too, like everyone else. You may think that the lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries that Tesla uses will help because they avoid cobalt. But lithium is also controlled by China, and just guess where Teslas batteries are made? Shanghai! So close, but no cigar, folks. Chinas CATL produces 75% of global LFP batteries. Now, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 allocated $3.16 billion for battery supply chains, but as we already know, the U.S. lacks refining infrastructure. And domestic mining of these minerals faces hurdles in the U.S. Nevada lithium deposits faced local opposition and only got approved in October 2024. Meanwhile, Minnesota cobalt remains untapped. Trump may accelerate all this, but it will take years to make it happen. Even if he steals all the rare earth minerals from Ukraine, those deposits are also largely unexploited. And, again, refining is controlled by China. Even if the U.S. could secure all the raw minerals it needs, building refineries here to reach the level will take years. And forget about recycling. Current systems recover less than 5% of lithium. As Solomon Asfaw, a battery expert at Finlands LUT University, told me in a video interview: Efficiency needs to hit 95% to offset demand. Otherwise, were just delaying collapse. In other words: Theres no short- or medium-term way around this, which makes it even more surprising that Trumps administration didnt see this coming. As Baskaran and Schwartz point out, everyone knew China showed no qualms in weaponizing rare earths. It started in 2010, when it banned exports to Japan over a fishing dispute. Between 2023 and 2025, it already imposed export restrictions on strategic materials like gallium, germanium, antimony, graphite, and tungsten to the U.S. It was only logical to assume that, in a trade war, Beijing was going to do exactly what is has done. The U.S. can invest billions in mines, refineries, and labs, but, for a few years, our economy will remain a hostage to China. Barron was right. The materials war is over before it even started. China won. Now comes the reckoning.
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A U.S. House committee on Tuesday asked 23andMe’s cofounder to testify next month as it launched an investigation into the risk of genetic data being transferred to potential buyers amid the DNA testing company’s bankruptcy. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky and the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter to 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki, seeking her testimony on May 6 as well as documents and information from the genomics firm. The genomics firm filed for bankruptcy protection last month after struggling with weak demand for its ancestry testing kits. Wojcicki made multiple failed takeover bids for the company and resigned as its CEO in March. She is still a board member of the company. The bankruptcy filing has raised concerns about where the genetic data it collected would go. The company has said the bankruptcy process will not affect how it stores, manages, or protects customer data. 23andMe collects saliva samples to provide insights into ancestry and health risks. There were concerns the data on 23AndMe’s more than 15 million customers, if not protected sufficiently, could be accessed by countries such as China, or used for assessing higher insurance premiums, among other purposes, Comer said. “We need to ensure the safety of Americans’ data,” Comer said in the letter. The company was also the target of a hack in 2023, when personal data of nearly seven million customers was exposed over five months. The company has also made at least 30 deals with pharmaceutical companies such as GSK, giving them access to its database. Most of its agreements remain undisclosed. 23andMe said in March any buyer will be required to comply with applicable laws about how customer data is treated. (This story has been refiled to correct the day of the week from “Monday” to “Tuesday” in paragraph 1) Siddhi Mahatole, Reuters
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E-Commerce
Most email apps have strong opinions about what your inbox should look like. Notion Mail is the opposite.The new offshoot from productivity app Notion is all about flexibility. It lets you slice and dice your emails however you want: group them by date, create dedicated sections for specific contacts, add notes, or even turn your inbox into a list of action items. Theres also an AI labeling feature that can automatically sort things like package updates or health-related messages.It can feel overwhelming at firstbut so can Notion itself. That hasnt stopped the productivity platform from amassing 100 million users, with use cases ranging from simple note-taking to complex database management. Notion Mail is trying to bring that same level of adaptability to your inboxand the more effort you put in, the more useful it gets.Notion Mail is available now for Gmail and Google Workspace users on the web and as a Mac app. An iOS app is coming soon, and support for more email providers is on the way.[Image: Notion]Roll your own inboxNotion Mails most interesting feature is the ability to customize what your default inbox view looks like, both in terms of how its organized and which emails youll see.For instance, I like having some visual separation between recent and older emails. By clicking the Edit View button and selecting Groups, you can choose a Date view that sorts emails into clusters for today, yesterday, last week, last month, and earlier.Notion Mails Groups feature has some other neat ways to partition your inbox, as well. You can have emails from specific people or domains appear at the top, separate read emails from unread ones, or group by label.Within the same Edit View menu, you can also set up filters to hide or show certain types of messages. This lets you filter out things like Gmails Promotions and Updates categories, certain keywords, or specific addresses.Where things get really interesting, though, is the Properties you can apply to each email. Some of these are standard things like the senders name or labels, but Notion also lets you append types of data, such as notes and status indicators. You can then use these properties to sort your inbox. By adding statuses like in progress or pending to your emails and then grouping them by status, for instance, you can turn your inbox into a kind of project management system.These views arent limited to your main inbox. Notion Mails left sidebar lets you create additional views, each with their own custom properties and groupings. That means you can keep a traditional inbox as your default, while also setting up a project managementstyle view for messages from colleagues. Like the main Notion app, Notion Mail includes several templates to help you get started, and itll eventually let users create and share their own.[Image: Notion]Occasionally iffy AI filteringNotion Mails other big feature involves using AI to organize your emails. With the Auto Label feature, you can enter the type of emails youre looking for, and Notion will try to fetch messages that match.While Gmails own filtering rules can already label incoming messages automatically, Notions AI can make inferences that a normal keyword search wouldnt pick up. An Auto Label rule for medical/doctor, for instance, might capture health-related emails even if those words didnt appear in the message.This opens up some potentially clever use cases. I set up a rule for anything related to package arrivals, for instance, giving me a quick way to see the status of all my deliveries. I also made a Suggest emails to delete rule, then used Notions Unsubscribe button to remove myself from a bunch of mailing lists.The downside to this approach is that it can miss things. When I set up a Florida 2025 trip Auto Label, it tagged a bunch of unrelated emails and excluded a few relevant ones. You can help the labeling by tagging or untagging specific messages, but in some cases youre just better off labeling emails manually.AI labeling is also how Notion plans to make money from its mail product. While Notion Mail is free, a $10 per month AI add-on is required to label more than a few hundred emails or so. That upgrade also adds AI composition features, and provides access to AI features in Notion proper.[Image: Notion]Tying it all togetherAfter a few days of using Notion Mail, I can see how it might dig its hooks in.Its been a while since Ive used Notion for everyday notetakingI switched to Obsidian, an offline-first alternative, a couple years backbut I still remember how it won me over. I started off using it for simple note-taking, but before long had developed a branching system of subpages for different projects, and was using templates to organize some of my product reviews. The more time I spent tweaking my notetaking setup, the more personally invested in it I felt.Notion Mail has a pretty similar learning curve. My first step was to set up a basic inbox view with just a few personalized tweaks, but Ive started to experiment with alternative views and can see how they might be better at organizing all the info thats trapped inside Gmail. And I know that if I keep sinking more time into it, the harder itll get to use anything else.
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