metallurgy
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Kaiser Aluminum. The value is in the details.
A jet, a beverage can, a precision tube. Kaiser Aluminum makes the metal behind all three. Its $670 million return to packaging reveals what customers are really buying: consistency.
Mark Millett and the advantages of a second choice
He went to America to ski, then helped build Steel Dynamics. As Mark Millett prepares to hand over the CEO role, his career offers a practical question: how do you make a company’s habits last longer than its founders?
Robert Mehrabian and the art of putting things together
Before he assembled Teledyne’s portfolio of sensing and imaging businesses, Robert Mehrabian built research teams and university laboratories. Across both careers, the interesting work happened where one specialty met another.
Duranium
Duranium is a Y Combinator (S25) advanced-materials company reshoring U.S. production of critical metals - titanium, magnesium, aluminum, zirconium and hafnium. It modernizes carbochlorination metallurgy with a novel reactor that recirculates CO and chlorine streams back into feedstock and spins off a saleable co-product (bleaching agents/hypochlorite), aiming to match Chinese-level pricing without subsidies while eliminating direct emissions. Founded in 2025 by CEO Brenden Prins-McKinney and CTO Berkley Noble, the company targets a pilot facility by June 2026 and roughly 12% of the U.S. magnesium market by 2029.
Magrathea
Magrathea is an Oakland, California clean-tech company rebuilding American magnesium production. Using a next-generation electrolytic process, it makes magnesium metal from seawater and brines with near-zero carbon emissions, aiming to break the West's dependence on Chinese supply for a metal critical to aerospace, automotive, and defense.