Mineral for Telephones, generators and loud speakers

A new mineral recently made its way from the cosmos into NASA’s labs. Named Brown­leeite after Donald Brownlee (a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and head of NASA’s Stardust comet sample return mission), the sub­stance was identified in a speck of cosmic dust taken from the stratosphere in 2003 by a high-altitude NASA aircraft. Brownleeite has been described as nature’s version of synthesized manganese silicide, a material created as a potential new-generation semiconductor. Although it occurs naturally, Brownleeite is far from abundant: This one-and-only sample was found in particles that were just 0.0001 inch wide.Source

Japan Journal of Applied Physics published on June 13, 2008 the result of manganese- implanted silicon investigation reveals that annealed sample shows ferromagnetism. Ferromagnetic materials are used in a wide variety of devices essential to everyday life—e.g., electric motors and generators, transformers, telephones, and loudspeakers.