Congo's coltan miners dig for world's tech — and struggle regardless of who is in charge

RUBAYA, Congo — Nestled in the green hills of Masisi territory in Congo , the artisanal Rubaya mining site hums with the sound of generators, as hundreds of men labor by hand to extract coltan, a key mineral crucial for producing modern electronics and defense technology — and fiercely sought after worldwide.

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Fast Company

15-06-2025

• Fast Company

Computer simulations reveal the first wheel was invented nearly 6,000 years ago

Imagine you're a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 BCE. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine's sweltering tunnels. You've resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable. With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip. As he returns to the mine to fetch another load, it suddenly dawns on you that your chosen profession is about to get far less taxing and much more lucrative. What you don't realize: You're witnessing something that will change the course of history—not just for your tiny mining community, but for all of humanity. Despite the wheel's immeasurable impact, no one is certain as to who invented it, or when and where it was first conceived. The hypothetical scenario described above is based on a 2015 theory that miners in the Carpathian Mountains (now Hungary) first invented the wheel nearly 6,000 years ago as a means to transport copper ore. The theory is supported by the discovery of more than 150 miniaturized wagons by archaeologists working in the region. These pint-size, four-wheeled models were made from clay, and their outer surfaces were engraved with a wickerwork pattern reminiscent of the basketry used by mining communities at the time. Carbon dating later revealed that these wagons are the earliest known depictions of wheeled transport to date. This theory also raises a question of particular interest to me, an aerospace engineer who studies the science of engineering design. How did an obscure, scientifically naive mining society discover the wheel, when highly advanced civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians, did not? A controversial idea It has long been assumed that wheels evolved from simple wooden rollers. But until recently no one could explain how or why this transformation took place. What's more, beginning in the 1960s, some researchers started to express strong doubts about the roller-to-wheel theory. After all, for rollers to be useful, they require flat, firm terrain and a path free of inclines and sharp curves. Furthermore, once the cart passes them, used rollers need to be continually brought around to the front of the line to keep the cargo moving. For all these reasons, the ancient world used rollers sparingly. According to the skeptics, rollers were too rare and too impractical to have been the starting point for the evolution of the wheel. But a mine—with its enclosed, human-made passageways—would have provided favorable conditions for rollers. This factor, among others, compelled my team to revisit the roller hypothesis. A turning point The transition from rollers to wheels requires two key innovations. The first is a modification of the cart that carries the cargo. The cart's base must be outfitted with semicircular sockets, which hold the rollers in place. This way, as the operator pulls the cart, the rollers are pulled along with it. This innovation may have been motivated by the confined nature of the mine environment, where having to periodically carry used rollers back around to the front of the cart would have been especially onerous. The discovery of socketed rollers represented a turning point in the evolution of the wheel and paved the way for the second and most important innovation. This next step involved a change to the rollers themselves. To understand how and why this change occurred, we turned to physics and computer-aided engineering. Simulating the wheel's evolution To begin our investigation, we created a computer program designed to simulate the evolution from a roller to a wheel. Our hypothesis was that this transformation was driven by a phenomenon called ' mechanical advantage.' This same principle allows pliers to amplify a user's grip strength by providing added leverage. Similarly, if we could modify the shape of the roller to generate mechanical advantage, this would amplify the user's pushing force, making it easier to advance the cart. Our algorithm worked by modeling hundreds of potential roller shapes and evaluating how each one performed, both in terms of mechanical advantage and structural strength. The latter was used to determine whether a given roller would break under the weight of the cargo. As predicted, the algorithm ultimately converged upon the familiar wheel-and-axle shape, which it determined to be optimal. During the execution of the algorithm, each new design performed slightly better than its predecessor. We believe a similar evolutionary process played out with the miners 6,000 years ago. It is unclear what initially prompted the miners to explore alternative roller shapes. One possibility is that friction at the roller-socket interface caused the surrounding wood to wear away, leading to a slight narrowing of the roller at the point of contact. Another theory is that the miners began thinning out the rollers so that their carts could pass over small obstructions on the ground. Either way, thanks to mechanical advantage, this narrowing of the axle region made the carts easier to push. As time passed, better-performing designs were repeatedly favored over the others, and new rollers were crafted to mimic these top performers. Consequently, the rollers became more and more narrow, until all that remained was a slender bar capped on both ends by large discs. This rudimentary structure marks the birth of what we now refer to as 'the wheel.' According to our theory, there was no precise moment at which the wheel was invented. Rather, just like the evolution of species, the wheel emerged gradually from an accumulation of small improvements. This is just one of the many chapters in the wheel's long and ongoing evolution. More than 5,000 years after the contributions of the Carpathian miners, a Parisian bicycle mechanic invented radial ball bearings, which once again revolutionized wheeled transportation. Ironically, ball bearings are conceptually identical to rollers, the wheel's evolutionary precursor. Ball bearings form a ring around the axle, creating a rolling interface between the axle and the wheel hub, thereby circumventing friction. With this innovation, the evolution of the wheel came full circle. This example also shows how the wheel's evolution, much like its iconic shape, traces a circuitous path—one with no clear beginning, no end, and countless quiet revolutions along the way.

Washington Post

18-05-2025

• Washington Post

Congo's coltan miners dig for world's tech — and struggle regardless of who is in charge

RUBAYA, Congo — Nestled in the green hills of Masisi territory in Congo , the artisanal Rubaya mining site hums with the sound of generators, as hundreds of men labor by hand to extract coltan, a key mineral crucial for producing modern electronics and defense technology — and fiercely sought after worldwide.

Yahoo

11-05-2025

• Yahoo

When was math invented?

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Mathematics is the basis of all science and has come a long way since humans started counting. But when did people start doing math? The answer is complicated because abstract mathematics is thought to be different from counting — although counting is the foundation of math — and because many advanced types of mathematics, such as calculus, were developed only within the past few hundred years. Humans couldn't have mastered complex and abstract math without figuring out how to count first, and evidence suggests our species was counting tens of thousands of years ago. The Ishango bone from Africa's Congo region indicates that Homo sapiens have been making "tallies" — a kind of counting — for at least 20,000 years. The 4-inch-long (10 centimeters) bone, probably from a baboon or a bobcat, was found in the 1950s. Researchers think the dozens of parallel notches cut into its surface were a "tally" — a recorded count of some unknown item — and in 1970, archaeologist Alexander Marshack argued it was a six-month lunar calendar. There's also the Lebombo bone, which was unearthed in southern Africa in the 1970s and was made about 43,000 years ago. It, too, is covered with cut notches and may have been a tally for the 29 days of a lunar month or for a human menstrual cycle. Danish historian of mathematics Jens Høyrup told Live Science that the very ancient origins of counting could never be known but that it might have been inspired by observations of the night sky by early Homo sapiens, before our species left Africa. "There was no artificial light then, only the fires within caves," he said. "And when you have no light pollution, the moon and the stars are a wonder to look at." Related: When did humans discover how to use fire? The next major step in mathematics came with the ancient Sumerians, who are also credited — perhaps coincidently — with inventing cuneiform, the earliest known type of writing. The Sumerians were one of the first Mesopotamian civilizations, and their city-states thrived in what's now southern Iraq from about 4500 to 1900 B.C. Among their key contributions were numerals that could be written on clay tablets in cuneiform's wedge-shaped marks, and the sexagesimal number system, which is the traditional base-60 system still used today for trigonometry, navigation and timekeeping. Mathematics, as opposed to simple counting, is the study of patterns and relationships using logical reasoning and abstract concepts. The ancient Sumerians developed the concepts of arithmetic — including tables for multiplication and division — and algebra, where unknown quantities were represented by symbols. They also developed formulas to calculate the areas of triangles, rectangles and irregular shapes, with which they measured land and designed irrigation systems. St. Lawrence University mathematician Duncan Melville told Live Science these developments were driven by the growing Sumerian bureaucracy. "Record-keepers needed to know not just what came into or left their stores, but how much or how many," he said in an email. Different mathematical notations were used depending on what was measured, and Sumerian scribes converted between these systems in tasks such as finding the area of a field from its measurements. "In this way we see the beginnings of arithmetic and computational geometry," he said. In addition to the developments of the Sumerians and their Mesopotamian successors, especially the Babylonians, early mathematical expertise and innovations came from ancient Egypt, Greece, India and China, and later from the Islamic civilization. Mathematics flourished in early modern Europe, where two scientists both claimed to have invented calculus — a way to determine the geometric area enclosed by any curve and an important advance in mathematics that underpins much of modern engineering and science. RELATED MYSTERIES —What was the longest-lasting civilization? —What was the first alphabet in the world? —When was steel invented? One was Isaac Newton, who said he'd invented calculus for his 1687 work "Principia Mathematica" (although he called his calculus "the method of fluxions"), and the other was the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had published a mathematical system of differentials and integrals a few years earlier. (His notation is still used today.) The two men and their supporters engaged in a bitter dispute about who deserved recognition for the invention, which included allegations that Leibniz had snuck a look at Newton's unpublished manuscript. But historians now think Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently of each other.