Rare Earth Elements

At www.livescience.com/technology/Rare-Earth-Elements-100614.html June 15th … mentions the recently discovered mineral wealth of Afghanistan, worth an estimated one trillion dollars. These include rare earth elements such as dysprosium, erium, and ytterbium which are found concentrated in ores and these and other strangely named elements are used in computer hard drives, TV screens, and smartphones, LED lights, and magnets in electronics, wind turbines and hybrid cars etc. Other rare earth elements include metals such as lanthanum, and gadolinium, and heavy earth metals such as terbium and lutetium. Green technololy uses some of these items, and so does the military. China and the US have large mineral deposits of rare earths but they also exist in Australia, Brazil, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Thailand.