Day 9: Mendelevium

_{^{Left: Dmitri Mendeleev, From Wikimedia Commons. Right: Mendelevium as it appears on the periodic table.}}

Another day, another incredibly radioactive element: Mendelevium! A much more modern one, you can usually tell because there is very clearly an eminent scientist’s name in it. But more on that later…

Mendelevium is a synthetic element, which means that it does not appear naturally (on Earth at least) but instead must be made in a lab. It is also in the actinide series, a cohort of elements similar to actinium often depicted (along with the lanthanides) at the bottom of the periodic table. They appear here because even though they should be slotted between radium and rutherfordium, this would make the periodic table too long to read. The reason why they should sit there? Well for that we need to talk about electron shells.

^{If the periodic table was arranged fully (top), the lanthanides and actinides would make it stretch out super long… In the modern periodic table (lower), the lanthanides and actinides are often plopped at the bottom. From Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay respectively.}

An electron shell is an orbit around an atom’s nucleus that a set number of electrons can do. There is a limited number of electrons allowed in each shell, and therefore if another electron is added to an atom with a full shell, a new shell starts slightly further out to contain the new electron. This is why in some diagrams of an element’s atom there are those concentric circles with electrons on them; those are the shells that the electrons of that atom possess.

An electron shell diagram of Mendelevium. Each of those concentric circles going out are electron shells. Therefore Mendelevium has 7 shells, and it is worth noting that the outer shell for mendelevium is not completely filled up. From Wikimedia Commons.

You may have noticed that some of these electron shells can hold more electrons than others. This is because each of these shells consist of a number of subshells. And it’s these subshells that we’re particularly interested in, as these are what gives the modern periodic table its structure. There are different types of subshell, and the further out the orbitals get, the more types of subshell they contain (hence why they mostly get bigger). I have coloured the subshells of mendelevium as best I can below:

Mendelevium with the s (red), p (green), d (orange) and f (blue) subshells filled in. Adapted from WIkimedia Commons.

The first subshell is called s, and contains only one pair of electrons (also known as an orbital). The second subshell is called p, and contains 3 orbitals (6 electrons). The third is called d and contains 5 orbitals, and the fourth is called f and (usually) contains 7 orbitals. Looking at the diagram you will have noticed that the first shell only contains s, then with subsequent shells the next subshell is included, apart from outer two shells which are not technically full yet (because atoms couldn’t just be easy could they?). This is where the periodic table comes in, as the width of the different blocks (including our annoying lanthanides and actinides) actually fit the number of electrons that go into one of the subshells (as shown below). An annoying thing (which some of you beady eyed readers may have noticed) is that the d and f blocks appear to be in the row below where they should be. This is because of how the electron shells fill up which aren’t quite in the order of subshells (which is why the outer shells of mendelevium are weird). But the rule of thumb is that as you read the elements left to right across the periodic table, another electron is added to the shell. Which means that in the smaller atoms which don’t have d or f subshells, the next element jumps across the table from the s to the p block. So that’s the reason why the periodic table has that strange shape, and why the lanthanides and actinides should sit between the s and d blocks. Phew, thanks for sticking with me.

The periodic table separated out into the subshell that the outermost electron is in. From Wikimedia Commons.

After all that subatomic chemistry, let’s talk about the discovery of mendelevium and the scientist it’s named after. As I said before, mendelevium doesn’t occur naturally and therefore rather than “discovered”, I guess it was “made” in 1955 by Stanley Thompson and his team at the University of California. They did this by bombarding einsteinium (yes that is a real element, just you wait until tomorrow) with alpha radiation- two protons and two neutrons stuck together, which increased the size of the einsteinium nuclei by two to make mendelevium. This new element was then named mendelevium after Dmitri Mendeleev, the creator of the periodic table back in the 19th century. As a small aside fact, mendelevium originally had the symbol Mv before it was changed to Md in 1957.

So there’s Mendelevium! Another radioactive element in the bag, but don’t worry; there are plenty more radioactive elements and plenty more elements left that are named after scientists. Watch this space…

Day 8: Titanium

^{(Clockwise from top left) Titanium crystals (from Wikimedia Commons), Titanium as it appears in the periodic table, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (from Wikimedia Commons).}

It’s David Guetta’s favourite element! Titanium is an element with a tonne of useful applications due to it being incredibly strong but much less dense than other metals of similar strength, such as steel. This combined with the fact that it is not easily corroded means it can be used as a lightweight construction metal, and if you mix it with other metals in alloys, well the applications start to run riot! And if THAT’S not enough, it is also bio-compatible, which means it is neither toxic nor rejected by the body’s immune system, meaning it is perfect for implants and medical implements.

^{Jet engines, mobile phones and spacecraft all contain titanium due to its lightweight strength. From Pixabay, Pikist and Wikimedia Commons.}

I think it will come as no surprise that titanium was discovered by a Cornish vicar. William Gregor (who as well as vicaring loved geology) found the element in 1791 in a substance called ilmenite, a black sand-like material that is weakly magnetic. The magnetic aspect to it was due to iron oxide in the sand, but there was another oxide in there too which Gregor could not figure out.

But Gregor was not the one to provide titanium’s powerful name. That honour went to Martin Klaproth, the chemist who put the K in potassium. He found the strange oxide, named it titanium after the titans of Greek myth fame, and then confirmed it to be the same element when sent a sample of ilmenite.

To go back to the applications for a moment though, I wanted to talk to you about a little white powder that involves titanium bonded to oxygen. Titanium dioxide has some interesting properties that almost give it as many applications as titanium itself. It is a brilliant white colour, due to that fact that the substance has in incredibly high refractive index, meaning that a majority of the light that hits it is reflected back. This means titanium dioxide is used as white paints, toothpaste, pills, plastics and even food, going by the E number E-171. If you get incredibly fine titanium dioxide powder (known as nano-titanium oxide) it even absorbs UV radiation, and is used in a wide range of sunscreens. It is also thought to be much less damaging to coral reefs, which i good because sunscreen is a significant factor in the destruction of this ecosystem.

^{Clockwise from top left: titanium dioxide powder, white paint, and sunscreen. From Wikimedia commons, PxHere and Needpix respectively.}

The final use of titanium dioxide has to be the most colourful, and involves the process of anodising. Anodising is a technique where a metal (in our case titanium) is submerged in an electrolyte solution like an acid, and an electronic current is passed through the solution such that the titanium is the positively charged anode (hence anodising), in what chemists call a cell. The result of this current is that positively charged hydrogen ions move towards the negative cathode, and the negatively charged hydroxide ions move towards the titanium anode. This reaction between the hydroxide ions and the titanium causes a layer of titanium oxide to appear on the surface of the metal. This has some excellent anti-corrosion uses, but we’re here for something slightly more exciting.

The aniodising process. Passing an electric current through an electrolyte solution (like sulphuric acid) allows the metal in the centre to have an oxide deposit on the surface. From WIkimedia Commons.

You see when light shines on aniodised titanium, the light reflecting off the titanium dioxide surface interferes with the light reflecting off the pure titanium underneath, producing a vibrant colour. This colour can even be controlled by how thick the layer of titanium dioxide on the metal surface is. So titanium can be coloured through aniodisation without using pigments or paints, and is often used in jewellery to this effect! Titanium sure is versatile.

Some weird and beautiful anodised titanium plates. From Wikimedia Commons.

And that’s titanium! Oh, just before I go, titanium bonded to 4 chloride ions (titanium tetrachloride) was used as a smokescreen in world war II. Okay I’m done now, byeee!

Day 7: Actinium

^{(Left) A sample of actinium (from Wikimedia Commons).}

Rounding off the first week of the blog we have another radioactive friend: actinium!

So what can we say about actinium? Well to start off with, it glows! Exactly what people want to hear about radioactive substances, right? It’s because the radiation coming off actinium is so strong that it ionises the air. This means that energy from the radiation is being absorbed by nitrogen and oxygen molecules, which enters them into what’s called an excited state (who doesn’t have extra energy when excited?). This energy is then usually released from the molecules in the form of light energy, with nitrogen emitting a purple light and oxygen emitting blue. So when sci-fi and cartoons have radioactive elements glowing, they’re not that far off!

^{Oxygen (above) and nitrogen (below) glowing when ionised. From Wikimedia Commons.}

Actinium is also an element that was discovered twice. The first discoverer was André-Louis Debierne, who in 1899 managed to find it in a substance called pitchblende, a predominantly uranium-rich substance that led to a lot of radioactive element discoveries. In fact, the pitchblende Debierne was extracting actinium from had been previously used by the Curies to extract radium. Debierne named the new element actinium, from the ancient Greek “aktinos” meaning ray.

The second discovery comes in 1902 when Friedrich Oskar Giesel managed to isolate actinium and claimed he had founded a new element, which he named emanium. However when the rate of decay of the two elements were compared, it was found that they were in fact the same element, which kept the name actinium in a “finders keepers” kind of way. However, there was some controversy about whether the substance Debierne submitted for analysis was the same as the substance he worked in in 1899. Giesel was also the one to correctly identify the atomic number of actinium and provided the first proper way to prepare the pure element, meaning that Giesel’s contribution to actinium’s discovery should not be swept under the historical rug.

So that’s actinium! But I hear you ask “what are its uses?” Well unfortunately it is such a rare and strongly radioactive substance (did you read the bit about it GLOWING?!) that there isn’t much that we can do with actinium, past some people looking into using it as either a source of radiation for experiments or to target cancer cells and kill them in radiotherapy (see the post on astatine). But sometimes science is about figuring out stuff that may seem pointless now, yet in the future may have a use we didn’t consider or have the capacity to understand. Actinium may gain an essential use to us… eventually…

Day 6: Astatine

^{(Left) Astatine, from wikimedia commons.}

The 6th day of this blog brings another radioactive element, astatine. It is an element that proved very difficult to work with, as it decays very quickly with a half life (the time it takes for half of the substance to decay) of just over 8 hours. Additionally any amount of astatine big enough to be visible to the human eye would instantly vaporise from the heat of its own radiation. This altogether means that although astatine can occur naturally as a result of other radioactive elements decaying to become them, it is the rarest naturally occurring element on the periodic table.

So you may be asking how on Earth this short-lived, super rare element was discovered? Well interestingly enough, after the gap in the periodic table was noticed, many people had falsely claimed to discover it, offering up some interesting names. The gap was noticed when Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table in 1869, and there was a space for a fifth halogen. The halogens are a group of elements with the similar property that they readily form salts when reacted with metals (halo- salt, gen- producing) and included fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine. The suggested 5th halogen was named “eka-iodine” using the sanskrit eka meaning one, which was a common way back then to denote an undiscovered predicted element one position below an established element.

Mendeleev (left) and his periodic table in 1869 (right). The red circle shows a gap where eka-iodine was thought to sit. From Wikimedia Commons

Now, as promised, the strange names given to false discoveries of eka-iodine. In 1931 Fred Allison claimed to have found it at Alabama Polytechnic, and called it “alabamine” (although if you find elements named after states weird, just you wait). In 1937, Rajendralal De thought claimed to have isolated it in Dacca, India. He named it dakin. In the 1930s and 1940s, Horia Hulubei and Yvette Cauchois were next to claim they found the element, naming it dorine, from the Romanian word for “longing”. The final false alarm was called helvetium, after the latin name for Switzerland, by Walter Minder. Unfortunately all these claims were debunked, but the next group were on the money.

At the University of California in 1940, Dale Corson, Kenneth MacKenzie and Emilio Segrè created the 5th halogen by bombarding another element, bismuth, with alpha radiation (2 protons and 2 neutrons usually found in an atom’s nucleus). They eventually named the element astatine, as a combination of the greek word astatos, meaning unstable (fitting), and adding the ine so that it fit in with the other halogens.

So are there any actual uses for the unstable element? Well there is one: radiotherapy. Astatine gives off alpha radiation of its own, which when targeted at cancerous tissues is very good at killing them before turning into a much more stable element, lead. This should be done incredibly carefully though, as this radioactive element can be toxic to your healthy cells too. It’s also worth being quick too, as astatine will decay in a matter of hours!

So there it is, the mysterious, rare and slightly useful 5th halogen. Want to know more about halogens? Well best you keep reading these posts!

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 Davy, a strong figure in purifying elements. Davy named the element potassium after potash, a substance containing potassium salts made through soaking plant ashes in a pot, then evaporating the water away. Potash was then used to make fertilisers, as (although people might not have fully understood why at the time) potassium is an essential element to help plants grow. He separated the potassium from its salts through exposing potash to sufficient electronic current to catalyse the breaking of its ionic bonds, a process known as electrolysis (from lysis meaning to loosen or break).

That’s all well and dandy, but then how come the chemical symbol of potassium is K? Well, although Davy was the first person to isolate pure potassium, he was not the first to identify it as a new element. Martin Klaproth, a German chemist, found in 1797 that potash contained a new element, which he named kali. This was related to the word “alkali”, which comes from the Arabic word for plant ashes. After Davy made his discovery and suggested potassium, the word kalium was proposed instead. This is why in Germanic languages it is kalium, and in English and French, potassium.

^{Battle of the chemists: potassium may have come from Davy (left), but the symbol K came from Klaproth (right). From Wikimedia Commons.}

Potassium in its pure form is highly reactive with water and oxygen in the air. In fact, pure potassium looks quite a dull grey, but if you cut it with a knife (a surprisingly easy task as it’s quite soft), you will get this shiny silver surface that quickly turns to look like the other sides. This is the potassium reacting with oxygen and moisture in the air to form potassium peroxide and potassium hydroxide. Should you drop potassium in water, it causes quite a violent and violet reaction, as potassium hydroxide and hydrogen gas is rapidly made. The reaction is also exothermic, meaning that a lot of energy is given off as heat as the reaction proceeds. This in fact releases enough heat to ignite the resultant hydrogen and powdered potassium, creating a purple flame. Very exciting indeed; although if it gets out of hand please do not use a water-based fire extinguisher!

What happens when potassium and water mix. From Wikimedia Commons.

The final thing I wanted to talk about with potassium is why people would want to ingest it (through banana or otherwise) in the first place. Potassium sits in the 1st group of the periodic table (aka the far left) along with other elements such as sodium. All these elements have something in common: they all have a single electron in the outer shell of their nucleus. This means that it doesn’t take as much energy for this electron to be passed onto another element or molecule compared with other electrons, and this is what often happens. As electrons are negatively charged, this leaves the potassium atom as a positively charged ion. It is this ion that proves so useful in the human body.

Atomic structure of potassium, showing its unpaired outer electron. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

You see, when there is a difference in ions inside and outside a cell in the body, this has several useful effects. Firstly, there is a charge difference across the membrane of the cell. Secondly, there is a difference in the concentration of specific ions (such as potassium) across the cell membrane. Finally, the amount of substance dissolved in water will be different across the cell membrane. Therefore manipulating what ions are on which side of a cell membrane can allow the body to do some crazy things, and the positively charged potassium ion is one of the body’s favourite ions to do this with. One way the body does this is through passing electrical signals up and down nerve cells by controlling the movement of charged ions across nerve membranes! It also allows the body to control where water will flow, as water will always want to move to where there is a higher concentration of dissolved molecules (a process known as osmosis). So potassium ions help your body take water into the bloodstream from the digestive system, and allow water to flow through the kidneys for filtering. I feel it important to mention at this point that because the potassium is in its ionic form it will not be reacting violently or violetly with the water it is dissolved in, so do not worry.

So I hope when someone mentions potassium next, you will elect to shout “OH YES THOSE HELP YOUR NEURONS WORK” or even just the word “KALIUM”… Variety is of course the spice of life.

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 radioactive that it even its name comes from “radioactive”. Or, more accurately, “radioactif”, as it was discovered in France by the expert in finding new elements that eventually kill you, Marie Curie. If you haven’t heard of Marie Curie before, prepare yourselves, as she is huge in the periodic table world! In fact, it was her that coined the term radioactive, as a combination of radiation (from the latin word for ray) and active.

The legend that is Marie Curie, taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Curie discovered radium in 1898 whist analysing a mineral called uraninite, or pitchblende. Consisting of a lot of another radioactive element, uranium, Curie found two new radioactive elements in the pitchblende: polonium (spoilers for a future post) and radium. In fact, radium is formed when uranium radiates parts of its nucleus away. As the number of protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus helps define an element, this decay of the uranium nucleus eventually leads to the atom becoming a different element, in this case radium. However this in turn means that radium itself doesn’t last too long, as eventually it too will decay and turn into radon (again, spoilers).

Now we all know nowadays that radioactive substances can also be very dangerous, and radium is no exception, with exposure increasing the risk of cancer. This is because the radiation radium gives off when decaying composed of bits of nucleus is called alpha radiation, and when it hits cells in the body it can damage the DNA inside, leading to the cells dying or mutating the DNA trying to fix it, increasing the change that the cells will continuously grow into tumours. Radium also gives off a radiation called gamma radiation, which has a similar effect on DNA. This is unfortunately what killed Marie Curie, making her a martyr to the chemical sciences.

^{Radium was used in luminescent paint until the 1960s. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.}

However, it took a law suit in the 1920s to really hammer home the real dangers of radium to hit the public. Back then radium was used in luminescent paint, for example in watches on the hands and clockface. The scientists and managers that made these watches took precautions to protect themselves against the radiation, but the workers who painted the dials were not, and in fact were told to lick the ends of their paintbrushes frequently to ensure they came to a fine point. This consistent ingestion of radium led to serious health defects in these workers, and eventually some terminally ill workers, named the “Radium Girls” filed a suit against the United States Radium Corporation. This lead to the proper protection being used for radium painters, which were still being used on dials until the 1960s.

Radium’s dangerous radioactivity did not stop some people trying to sell it for medicinal purposes. Wonderfully named “radioactive quackery”, radium was sold in toothpaste, hair creams and even water! Often just put forward as a “cure-all”, these were in fact incredibly dangerous, leading one man called Eben Byers to be buried in a lead-lined coffin after drinking radium water so much his body was a danger.

Smartwater, step aside! Radium in water was “good for you”… From Wikimedia Commons

Strangely enough, radium is used sometimes today in radiotherapy against certain cancers by targeting and killing malignant cells. So in a way, radium is trying its best to make up for its carcinogenic history, which is in a way admirable.

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 latin Ferrum. It is thought that the word “iron” itself comes from the Celtic word “isarnon”, meaning “powerful, holy” and “strong”.

Iron is another one of those elements where there isn’t really a “discoverer”, but did have an entire iron age that started roughly around 1200BC, although some civilisations did not start using iron until much later. Although iron was known about and some civilisations had started to smelt iron halfway through the bronze age, bronze was still preferred for quite some time. This was because copper and tin, the main components of the alloy bronze, were easier to extract from ore and to melt than iron, which needed a specialised furnace. Iron on its own is also not that much harder than bronze. However, the bronze age is thought to have “collapsed” around 1200BC due mainly to a lack of available tin, and therefore the use of iron started to accelerate.

Iron furnace in Bonawe, Scotland. Iron required much higher temperatures to melt. From Wikimedia commons.

One of the most famous ways to make iron stronger is through using it to make the alloy steel. Steel is typically iron mixed with the non-metal element carbon, although other elements may also be present (for example if you add the metal element chromium, you get the more rust resistant “stainless steel”). The earliest record of steel production was seen in around 1800BC, before even the iron age, in Anatolia (now the main peninsula of Turkey), although steel as a powerful industry wasn’t really established until the mid-19th century. This extra strength allows steel to be used in construction and cutlery.

Another great property of iron is that it can be magnetised. This means that it can not only be attracted to magnets, but also become a magnet! And to understand why, we must go to the atomic level. So every atom has electrons whizzing around it, which all have their own little magnetic field. Another thing about electrons is they often pair up if they’re at the same energy level, which cancels out their little magnetic fields as they point in opposite directions. However, unless they absolutely have to, electrons towards the outer “shell” of the atom will not necessarily pair up, and these electrons will not cancel out their magnetic fields, and in fact their fields can line up together to produce an overall larger magnetic field. If this happens at the atomic level, those atoms have quite a strong magnetic field! Iron happens to have unpaired electrons in its atoms.

Iron atom with the nucleus (pink) surrounded by the shells of electrons (grey). The two electrons on the outermost shell are unpaired, and therefore their magnetic fields matter! Adapted from WikiMedia Commons.

However, what is special about some elements, including iron, is that when all those magnetised atoms come together in a lattice structure to form the solid metal, those atoms line up so that all their magnetic fields point in the same direction, allowing the whole substance to be magnetic. This is not true, for example, with chromium, where the atoms alternate where they are pointing their magnetic field, cancelling out the overall magnetism. Whichever structure of atoms a substance uses is usually the one with the lowest energy.

Atoms represented by little magnets in a solid. If they all line up (ferromagnetic), there’s an overall magnetic field. If they alternate (anti-ferromagnetic) or have no particular arrangement (paramagnetic), there is no magnetic field. Taken from the wonderful video “MAGNETS: How Do They Work? from minutephysics on YouTube.

So that explains how iron can be attracted to a magnet, but how can a lump of iron become magnetic itself? Well a lump of iron will consist of a bunch of “domains”, which are blocks of iron atoms arranged so that their magnetic fields point in the same direction. The problem is that each domain may have their magnetic field pointing in different directions cancelling each other out, meaning that the overall effect on the lump of iron is that it’s not magnetic. However, if you expose the lump to a strong magnetic field, eventually all the domains will line up their magnetic field to this big external one. Once all the domains are lined up, hey presto, you got a magnet! So iron is magnetic and can become a magnet because its electrons and lattice structure allow it to line up its tiny magnetic fields to create one massive one. Phew, hopefully that makes sense!

As a biochemist at heart, I couldn’t finish a this post without talking about how humans (and other animals) have been using iron since well before the iron age: in blood. In red blood cells, also known as erythrocytes (from greek: erythro=red, cyte=cell), there are protein called haemoglobin, which can bind oxygen and allows erythrocytes to carry this oxygen around the body from the lungs. Bound to each haemoglobin is a molecule called haem, which has in its centre-you guessed it- iron.

Red blood cells in a blood vessel (not to scale I’m afraid). From Wikimedia Commons.

This iron has lost two electron from its outer shell, making it an iron ion (sounds a bit like Aaron Aaronson from Hot Fuzz…) with a positive charge. This helps the ion to bind the oxygen reversibly, and also gives the haemoglobin, erythrocyte and blood the classic deep red colour. Therefore once again iron’s unpaired outer electrons allow it to perform an excellent function!

So there we go, iron! The bloody magnetic construction queen of elements. I swear not all elements are named in specific ages…

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 by Margeurite Perey, a physicist who was mentored by Marie Curie (spoilers: this name will come up in future entrees).

Marguerite Perey, discoverer of francium. Taken from wikipedia.

She discovered it after noticing that when an element called actinium emitted radiation, it initially released protons and neutrons from its nucleus (alpha radiation). This made the nucleus smaller, changing the actinium into a new element that she named francium, after her home country of France. Francium is in fact one of two elements named after France, but more of that later. Francium itself is quite unstable, with the element decaying into the elements astatine, radium or radon in a matter of minutes. At any given moment, there is less than a gram of francium in the whole Earth.

Marguerite Perey (second from the left) at the Curie laboratory. Taken from Musée Curle/ACJC collection

Unfortunately, because of its scarcity and instability, francium doesn’t have an awful lot of applications outside research, where it can be used to evaluate changes in atomic energy levels. However, it has been found that francium taken into the body can accumulate in early onset tumours. This could be promising for cancer diagnosis, and in fact was put forward as one by Perey, but unfortunately francium itself is carcinogenic, and ironically she died of cancer most likely linked to her research in 1975.

So there is La Marseillaise of elements, francium! Don’t worry though Francophiles, there are plenty more french-discovered elements en route.

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 big in ancient times.

Copper is such an ancient element in human history that we have no idea when it was first “discovered”, as copper ore can be found naturally in rock. However, the oldest evidence of copper smelting we have was found at Rudnik Mountain in Serbia, and dated to around 5,000BC. Therefore the Copper Age is thought to have been between 5,000 and 3,000BC. The age of copper was succeeded by the age of bronze, which was still technically a win for the metal of Cyprus.

This is because bronze, and brass for that matter, are alloys of copper. Alloys are the result of a smelting and mixing of two metals, in this case copper is combined with zinc to make brass, and tin to make bronze. The resultant alloys were stronger and more resistant to corrosion than pure copper; allowing them to be used in more robust applications like weapons and musical instruments.

That doesn’t mean copper can’t do well on its own though. Apart from silver, copper is the best conductor of heat and electricity of any metal of the periodic table. This is because of a lattice structure of copper, where positive copper ions are arranged in a regular structure, with electrons freely moving amongst those ions:

Taken from RF Photonics lab, Dartmouth Ma

These free electrons are what allow electrical charge and heat energy to travel easily through the copper, making it a great conductor. This is why copper is often used in wires and cooking implements. Copper also doesn’t corrode easily, which combined with its relative cheapness means copper pipes are often used in plumbing. Copper is also biostatic, which means that bacteria and other microorganisms cannot grow on it. This is particularly useful in things we touch often, which is why many door handles are made of brass.

Copper is not entirely resistant to reacting with its surroundings. After continued exposure, copper with oxidise, reacting with acidic elements in the air to make a green substance called Verdigris. It is usually a mixture of copper carbonate or copper chloride, and explains why the Statue of Liberty (which is made of copper) is now a light blueish green. When it was made, the statue of liberty was the orangey-brown of copper!

Taken from Reddit

So there it is, the metal of Cyprus now used for cooking, electronics and greeting immigrants seeking the American dream.

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 day for the rest of this year, as there are 118 confirmed elements and 118 days left until January 1st.

Fact checks welcome!