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Good point. Almost every capacitive touchscreen uses a vapor-deposited coating of indium tin oxide (ITO) as a transparent conductor.

Granted, it's a microscopic amount of indium, but still.



Indium isn't a rare earth element, is it?


Technically, its a (rare) precious metal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precious_metal


Which is a completely different thing than a rare earth metal. (Which incidentally are not rare or precious.)

To be fair, the group is badly named, but rare earth metals has a very precise meaning -- if something is not one of the lanthanides, Scandium, or Yttrium, it's not REE.


Technically it's not in the set of rare earth metals, though it is rare (at least in naturally occurring and isolated form).


And rare earth metals are not rare. So it's completely different.





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