Day 86: Cerium

Clockwise from left: a lump of cerium in argon to stop it from tarnishing (from Wikimedia Commons), the largest asteroid in the solar system’s asteroid belt and dwarf planet Ceres (from Wikimedia Commons), cerium as it appears on the periodic table. Today’s element is the first of the lanthanides: cerium! It’s uses are a bit

Day 85: Uranium

Clockwise from left: a very exciting picture of Uranus (from Pixabay), a lovely dangerous disc of enriched uranium (from Pixabay), uranium as it appears in the periodic table. Well here we are: the posterchild of radioactive elements: uranium! This is a tricky post to write highlighting the importance of this element considering how much we’ve

Day 81: Lutetium

Clockwise from left: an ultrapure lump of lutetium (from Wikimedia Commons); the city of Paris, which back in the Roman times was called Lutetia (from Wikimedia Commons); lutetium as it appears in the periodic table. So there are two elements named after France (francium and gallium), but that doesn’t mean we were done with French

Magnesium: Animated!

With thanks to the beautiful and talented Dan Heap, here’s an animated version of my blog post about the sparkly trickster element, magnesium: Please give Dan some love for his part, by emailing him at dankrisheap at gmail dot com next time you need an animation project!

Welcome!

As last year was “The Year of the Periodic Table”, and I shamefully missed it, I thought it would be nice to learn (then share said learnings with others) something about each of the elements of the periodic table. The plan is to write a bit about a random element of the periodic table each