Kseniia Pavlova

There are not many people who know this mineral exists. It is hardly known on the gem market as well, with a rare jeweller being able to tell it from a diamond. Each jewel with this stone is truly unique.

A thousand cubic metres of LNG is sold in Asia for about $75, a lot less than needed to keep the production profitable.

This gemstone is a blue variety of beryl, which is particularly fancied by those of noble blood. Princess Diana is among them.

South Korea has been traditionally occupying leading positions in global rankings based on IQ levels of its citizens. Education has become a cult in this country: a school day may start at 7:30 am and end at 10 pm. But which is even less believable, there is a school employee who walks around classrooms, checks on pupils and wakes them up if they fell asleep. Where does this attention to education come from and what it ends in?

Botswana is the second-largest diamond producer in the world after Russia. Hence the country managed to build up one of the most successful economies on the African continent. Authorities are, however, concerned of its one-sidedness… Judging by the country’s standards, Leepile Mompati Keeme has a tiny family – his parents gave birth to ’only’ five children. While there are numerous universities and colleges in Botswana, only one of Leepile’s brothers graduated from a local university. The others went to study abroad, having chosen either China, South Africa or the US.

Turkmenistan is often compared to North Korea based on the level of the country’s isolation. There is very little information about the state, and its reliability is often hard to check. For instance, not a single COVID-19 case has been registered there, but rumours say petrol is shared freely among citizens. Leyla Aliyeva, a student at Saint-Petersburg Mining University, explains which stories are real and which are only imagination.

This mineral is one of the most common ones on our planet, with its crystals weighing up to several dozens of tons and often being enormously large.

This stone is a real treasure for it can relieve symptoms of those suffering from hangover or alcohol intoxication.

A stone whose price never ceases to amaze is a true sensation of the last century. This treasure is listed in the Guinness Book of Records. Its name even relates to the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Socrates, arguably the world’s most known philosopher, was executed by poisoning - he drank a mixture containing poison hemlock. At that time death penalty alongside with ostracism, a procedure in which any citizen of ancient Athens could be expelled from the state, were among the most popular methods of punishment. If the majority voted in favour of the sentence, a person had no other choice but to leave or die. Quite often, people who ended up in exile or sentenced to death were later acknowledged as the national pride. There is a chance something similar is happening with hydrocarbons today.

There are large oil reserves in Ecuador but not enough specialists who know how to work with modern technologies. Therefore locals, if an opportunity emerges, choose to study abroad.

Collectors all across the globe are willingly paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for some samples of this stone. And the fact the samples they buy may easily lose their attractiveness does not seem to stop them.

Life has become a success story for a young man from Côte d’Ivoire. As a child, he used to help his family on corn plantations. Some 15 years later, he is a PhD student at St. Petersburg Mining University who got a chance to shake hands with a Nobel laureate in physics.

While this stone can help in curing cancer or with recovery from a heart stroke, it can, on the opposite, prevent a person from resisting the mildest diseases.

An Iraqi Kurd has told the story of how he ended up studying at Saint-Petersburg Mining University. What is he doing to preserve his cultural identity on the way to fulfilling a lifetime dream - to become an oil & gas specialist?

This dull and rather mediocre looking stone does not fade with time but instead keeps getting prettier.