Short answers, pulled from the story.
French chemist Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered dysprosium in 1886, but the element remained a laboratory curiosity until the 1950s when Frank Spedding developed ion-exchange techniques to produce the metal in a relatively pure state.
Dysprosium is essential for high-performance applications including sound navigation and ranging systems in the marine industry, permanent magnets in electric vehicle motors and wind turbine generators, and control rods in nuclear reactors.
Approximately 100 grams of dysprosium are consumed per electric car produced to substitute up to 6% of the neodymium in neodymium-iron-boron magnets, which raises the coercivity required for demanding applications.
Scientists obtained the first Bose-Einstein condensate of dysprosium atoms in 2011, and they created a two-dimensional supersolid quantum gas using the element in 2021.
China produced 40% of the global dysprosium supply in 2021, followed by Myanmar at 31% and Australia at 20%, creating a fragile supply chain due to the lack of dysprosium-dominant minerals.