Comment – Australia - So much for Australia catching the critical metals wave. Sure, we do have two tungsten producers but the main one is German-owned. Yes, we mine antimony -- well, actually a Canadian company does that for us. There is a tin producer, except that the operation is half Chinese-owned.

Graphite? Well, we're getting there, but slowly. Rare earths? It has been 17 years (at least) since work started on any of the current projects. Vanadium production has -- at last -- begun in Western Australia, but what a saga behind that; the deposit was found in 1982 and production was seemingly all set to go by 1999.

Galway Metals Inc., a company that holds a 100% interest in the Victorio tungsten-molybdenum project situated in New Mexico, has announced that common shares will be listed and will commence trading on the TSX Venture Exchange effective January 4, 2013, under the symbol “GWM.”

As previously disclosed on December 20, 2012, Galway Metals received conditional approval to list its common shares on the TSX-V in connection with a plan of arrangement (the "Arrangement") among formerly listed Galway Resources Ltd. ("Galway Resources"), AUX Acquisition 2 S.àr.l, AUX Canada Acquisition 2 Inc., Galway Metals and Galway Gold Inc. that closed on December 20, 2012. Galway Metals is well capitalized with US$12 million cash and holds a 100% interest in the Victorio tungsten-molybdenum project in New Mexico formerly held by Galway Resources.

Barry Hearn returns to Alexandra Palace this weekend with his latest sporting spectacle: the World Championship of Ping Pong.

If they think it is all over at the Alexandra Palace now that the PDC World Darts Championship has stepped back from the oche, they had better think again. The staff there may have just de-tacked the carpet, gathered up the Himalayas of empty pint pots and filled the lost-property room with forgotten items of fancy dress (every year several pantomime cow rear ends are left behind in the gents, at least one of which is still occupied). But the king of sporting spectacle will not be abandoning the place anytime soon. Indeed, the man behind the arrows claims things could get messy all over again at Ally Pally.

This weekend Barry Hearn returns to the arena where his tungsten tips have ruled with his latest innovation: the World Championship of Ping Pong. In characteristic style, he insists the event will not be quiet. Via use of laser lighting, a thumping disco beat and – we assume – 8,000 inebriated fans chanting “duh-duh-duh duh duh der-duh-duh-duh” at the end of every rally, he intends to turn the once gentle dining-room pastime of table tennis into an all-action must-watch television event on a par with the arrows.

Tungsten disulfide is a semiconductor and in bulk possesses distinct band gaps. Mauricio Terrones' group at Pennsylvania State University in the US, however, have been looking at this material not in bulk, but as a triangular two-dimensional crystal.

The picture behind shows what happens when Terrones' team  made these small crystals – the edges showed an incredible photoluminescence at room temperature (around 25 times stronger than at the centre of the triangle). As the material changes from bulk to monolayer, the interaction between electronic states also changes and the material becomes a direct band gap semiconductor – allowing electrons that move from a higher energy band to a lower band to emit a photon. However, that doesn't in itself explain the boosted luminescence at the edges. That is helped, it seems, by the structure at the edges, involving zig-zag patterns of sulfur atoms, but the overall explanation is still unclear.