Curated playlist
Chemical elements with hexagonal close-packed structure
- DysprosiumDysprosium carries a name that doubles as a confession. Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran needed more than thirty attempts to pull it free from holmium oxide, and when he finally succeeded in Paris in 1886, he reached for the Greek word…
- ZincZinc is the only metal that appears in every single enzyme class in the human body. That one fact hints at how deeply this element is woven into the fabric of living things. It sits at atomic number 30 on the periodic table, its symbol Zn…
- ZirconiumZirconium sits at atomic number 40 on the periodic table, carrying a symbol - Zr - that hints at the Persian word zargun, meaning "gold-like" or "as gold." That ancient name for a glittering gemstone now belongs to a metal whose true value…
- CadmiumCadmium hides in plain sight. Atomic number 48 on the periodic table, it sits quietly alongside zinc and mercury in group 12, a soft silvery-white metal that most people have never consciously encountered. Yet it travels with us…
- TerbiumTerbium, element 65 on the periodic table, lights up your living room, guides submarines through the ocean, and was discovered by accident inside a batch of impure yttrium oxide in 1843. Its symbol is Tb, and it sits in the lanthanide…
- TitaniumTitanium is a metal that quietly surrounds us everywhere, yet most people have no idea they are touching it dozens of times a day. It holds the bones of spacecraft together. It anchors dental implants into human jaws for over 30 years. It…
- BerylliumBeryllium carries atomic number 4, making it one of the lightest solid metals on the periodic table, yet it is strong enough to be used in the mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope and in the beam pipes threading through the Large…
- CobaltCobalt sits at atomic number 27 on the periodic table, but its story begins not in a laboratory, but in a German silver mine where frustrated miners blamed a goblin for their troubles. Sixteenth-century German miners called a troublesome…
- ErbiumErbium sits at atomic number 68 on the periodic table, a silvery-white metal that almost nobody encounters in its pure form. In nature, it never appears alone. It hides inside other minerals, bonded to neighboring elements, invisible until…
- RutheniumRuthenium sits at atomic number 44 on the periodic table, carrying the symbol Ru. In 1844, Karl Ernst Claus, a Russian scientist of Baltic-German ancestry working at Kazan State University, held in his hand just 6 grams of a metal no one…
- ScandiumScandium sits at atomic number 21 on the periodic table, carrying the symbol Sc and a reputation that defies its abundance. It is not actually rare in the Earth's crust. Estimates place it at 18 to 25 parts per million, putting it in…
- YttriumYttrium sits on the periodic table with symbol Y and atomic number 39, but its story begins not in a laboratory, but in a Swedish quarry. In 1787, a part-time chemist named Carl Axel Arrhenius picked up a heavy black rock near the village…
- GadoliniumGadolinium hides a paradox inside a hospital scanner. At body temperature, this silvery-white metal exhibits the greatest paramagnetic effect of any element. That single property lets doctors inject solutions of it into a patient's veins…
- MagnesiumBurning magnesium reaches a temperature of roughly 3,100 degrees Celsius, and it throws off a brilliant white light rich in ultraviolet wavelengths. That light once lit the earliest photographs, fired theatrical lightning, and made trick…
- HafniumHafnium is so chemically alike its sister metal zirconium that for decades no one could prove it existed at all. Dmitri Mendeleev predicted a heavier cousin of titanium and zirconium back in 1869, leaving a quiet gap in his periodic table.…