The Covid-19 pandemic has stopped or at least slowed down many industries’ operations with a number of consequences and ramifications. The shutdown, which is hopefully only temporary, of a factory, is a clearly visible event, but behind it, there may be other events connected to it and less visible. For example, there are important materials in several different industries such as tungsten carbide and silicon nitride: in their case, there are problems connected to production and distribution, but there’s also the problem connected to research on their performance and to the expansion of their applications.