Day 5: Potassium

Clockwise from top left: Solid potassium (from Wikimedia Commons), Potassium from the periodic table, bananas (from Wikimedia Commons) Usually when I say potassium to people, they scream back “BANANAS!” As much as I love Honey We Shrunk Ourselves, there’s certainly more to potassium than just bananas. The element was first purified in 1814 by Humphrey

Day 4: Radium

Left: Watch hands painted with radium, from Wikimedia Commons. Right: radium in the periodic table. It seems that the elements randomly chosen by me for the start of this blog are either radioactive or metals with ages named after them… Don’t worry they won’t all be that! But today we have radium, an element so

Day 3: Iron

(Clockwise from top left) Stacks of steel tubes (From Pikrepo), Iron as it appears on the periodic table, Lumps of pure iron (from Wikimedia Commons). Had to wade through a bunch of steam irons to find these ¬¬ Day three brings another classic metal element: iron! The chemical symbol of iron, Fe, comes from the

Day 2: Francium

(Left image taken from Wikipedia) A tad more obscure than yesterday’s copper, our 2nd element is Francium. Francium was the last element to be discovered that occurs naturally, with every subsequent element discovered being created in a lab. The only element that is rarer in nature than francium is astatine. It was discovered in 1939

Day 1: Copper

(Clockwise) The Statue of Liberty (from Wikipedia), copper wires (from Demarco) and copper pipes (from Cleanipedia). The first element of the blog: Copper! The word copper comes from the latin word “Cuprum”, which roughly translates to “Cyprus metal”, as the island of Cyprus used to be a rich source of copper back when latin was