Longchang vs Cobalt

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Longchang (Chinese: 隆昌; pinyin: Lóngchāng) is a county-level city of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of Neijiang city. Longchang has a population of nearly 760,000, covering 792 square kilometer. Longchang seizes an important geographic location as the boundary of Sichuan and Chongqing, and plays as distributing center of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Chongqing. Since the advantageous location, many important traffic ways pass through Longchang, like the Chengdu–Chongqing Railway, highway, public road, East Chuanyun (Sichuan to Yunnan) road, Longna (Longchang to Luzhou) highway, Longya (Longchang to Ya'an) road, Longhuang (Longchang to Huangtong Guizhou) railway.

To get out of Sichuan Province and further go to the sea, you could choose Longchang as the best way. Thus it is called the east gate of Sichuan. In the long history, Longchang is famous for memorial arches and blue stone. Longchang is a feature to develop tourism. Nowadays, Longchang has finished the plan of bluestone cultural city with eight bluestone image views, including gate, culture, city's dining room, lounge, green park, landscape, business district, landmark. Still this county has some other tourism resources, like groups of memorial arches, Guyu artificial lake, Yunding stockaded village, and Lamp Mountain.

Source: Wikipedia

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Cobalt is a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27. Like nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal. Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment-producing minerals; they were so named because they were poor in known metals, and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold. Today, some cobalt is produced specifically from one of a number of metallic-lustered ores, such as cobaltite (CoAsS). The element is, however, more usually produced as a by-product of copper and nickel mining.

The copper belt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia yields most of the global cobalt production. World production in 2016 was 116,000 metric tons (114,000 long tons; 128,000 short tons) (according to Natural Resources Canada), and the DRC alone accounted for more than 50%.Cobalt is primarily used in lithium-ion batteries, and in the manufacture of magnetic, wear-resistant and high-strength alloys. The compounds cobalt silicate and cobalt(II) aluminate (CoAl2O4, cobalt blue) give a distinctive deep blue color to glass, ceramics, inks, paints and varnishes. Cobalt occurs naturally as only one stable isotope, cobalt-59. Cobalt-60 is a commercially important radioisotope, used as a radioactive tracer and for the production of high-energy gamma rays. Cobalt is the active center of a group of coenzymes called cobalamins. Vitamin B12, the best-known example of the type, is an essential vitamin for all animals. Cobalt in inorganic form is also a micronutrient for bacteria, algae, and fungi.

Source: Wikipedia