2026-10-14 · South China Morning Post
🔮 China’s Dune-like sand crawler could turn the whole Taklamakan Desert into an iron mine
Device based on rare earth magnets traverses the sands to extract a precious resource in real-world echo of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic
In Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune, mobile factories traverse the sands of the fictional planet Arrakis to extract the drug melange, also known as “spice”. speculative