The cost of titanium is about to fall. LINK A new smelting method is about to go into commercial production. It replaces an expensive series of chemical steps with an electolysis method that converts the raw material directly into metal.

"'It was shocking to see the little pellet of white titanium dioxide, which looks like an aspirin pill, being transformed into a piece of titanium,' Fray recalls. 'We sat around asking, 'Why hasn't this been done before?''"

Actually titanium is a pretty abundant element. It's just been that the process of refining ores into metal is expensive, complex, dangerous, and inefficient. Now all that is going to change.

It's little things like this that can alter the entire fabric of how the future of technology progresses.