A new mineral recently made its way from the cosmos into NASA’s labs. Named Brownleeite after Donald Brownlee (a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and head of NASA’s Stardust comet sample return mission), the substance was identified in a speck of cosmic dust taken from the stratosphere in 2003 by a high-altitude NASA aircraft. Brownleeite has been described as nature’s version of synthesized manganese silicide, a material created as a potential new-generation semiconductor. Although it occurs naturally, Brownleeite is far from abundant: This one-and-only sample was found in particles that were just 0.0001 inch wide.