Learning is a lifelong process. It starts when we're babies and follows us into old age. Education is essential to our development and to how we see the world. The desire for knowledge starts at a young age through an exploration of one's surroundings, followed by formal education and beyond. Throughout life, we learn to retain information in a certain way and whatever your preferred style is, it's crucial to understand why it works for you. If you understand the basics, you can improve and build on them to further your knowledge.

Maura Kolb is more familiar with analyzing rock samples than computer code, but as exploration manager at Goldcorp's Red Lake gold mine, she now finds herself in charge of an innovative approach to exploration that involves both. The project, in partnership with IBM, uses IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform to identify exploration targets at the Ontario mine. Since the project was launched in March 2017 at the Disrupt Mining event at PDAC, Goldcorp says the time it takes to process survey data has fallen by 97 per cent. "Being able to go through [our data] quickly, that's something no one else can do right now," said Kolb. "We can ask questions of our data that we haven't been able to in the past." The main goal of the project is to use Watson to help identify high-grade areas at Red Lake that were previously overlooked by human eyes.

China has already taken a significant step into Germany. In the Rheinhausen district of Duisburg, trains are now rolling across the site where steelworkers once fought unsuccessfully to save their mill in 1987 while shipyard cranes stack up containers on the banks of the Rhine River. This is the precise point where the New Silk Road, China's massive infrastructure project, comes to an end. The site in Duisburg is known as Logport I and it is one of the largest container ports in Europe. Twenty-five trains arrive each week at Terminal DIT, also known as the China Terminal, after having traveled the more than 10,000 kilometers from Chongqing across Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland. Four years ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the inland port.