Curated playlist
Chemical elements with face-centered cubic structure
- NickelNickel the metal is named after a mischievous sprite from German miner folklore.
- YtterbiumIn 2013, two ytterbium atomic clocks set a record for stability.
- LeadPencil leads have never contained lead. The graphite inside was simply named plumbago.
- AluminiumAluminium is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust, yet for most of history no one had seen any.
- PlatinumSpanish colonizers once dismissed platinum as an impurity in gold. An official decree even banned mixing it into gold.
- EinsteiniumEinsteinium, element 99, was first found in the cloud from a hydrogen bomb test. The Ivy Mike blast came in 1952.
- OganessonOganesson, element 118 with the symbol Og, is the heaviest atom known, and its namesake was unimpressed by the honor. In a 2019 interview, the physicist Yuri Oganessian was asked how it felt to see his name in the periodic table beside…
- SilverThe Phoenicians found so much silver in Spain that it would not fit on their ships.
- CalciumPure calcium metal burns skin the moment you touch it. Yet the same element holds your skeleton together.
- PalladiumFord lost nearly one billion US dollars after stockpiling palladium during a Russian supply panic.
- RhodiumRhodium, a metal, rose from under US$700 an ounce in 2016 to nearly US$30,000 in 2021.
- IridiumA thin layer of iridium-rich clay helped explain the dinosaurs' death.
- GoldGold's famous Witwatersrand deposit was not seeded by an asteroid. The impact only tilted buried rocks.