Curated playlist
Dietary minerals
- ChromiumChromium, element number 24 on the periodic table, carries a name borrowed from the ancient Greek word for color. That origin is no accident. The chemist who first isolated it in 1797, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, had already watched it…
- NickelNickel, element 28 on the periodic table, takes its name from a mischievous sprite of German miner mythology. In the ore mountains of medieval Germany, miners kept finding a metallic yellow mineral that looked exactly like copper ore. They…
- MolybdenumMolybdenum carries a name that is, in a sense, a mistake. It comes from the Ancient Greek word molybdos, meaning lead, because for centuries its dark ores were confused with the ores of lead. The element hides behind the symbol Mo and the…
- 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…
- PotassiumPotassium is a metal that can be sliced with a kitchen knife. Drop a piece into water and it bursts into a lilac-colored flame. Leave it in open air for a few seconds and it turns into a flaky white crust of potassium peroxide. This is…
- ChlorideChloride is in every glass of seawater, every cell in your body, and the salt you shake onto your food. At a concentration of 19,400 milligrams per liter, it is the dominant ion in the ocean. Yet most people have never thought carefully…
- ManganeseManganese, the chemical element with the symbol Mn and atomic number 25, sits quietly inside almost every can of soda and every batch of stainless steel, yet most people have never heard its name. It is a hard, brittle, silvery metal that…
- 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…
- SeleniumSelenium sits at atomic number 34 on the periodic table, but it refuses to behave like a single, predictable substance. Depending on how it cools, it can appear as a brick-red powder, a glossy black solid, or a grey metallic-looking…
- VanadiumVanadium sits at atomic number 23 on the periodic table, carrying the symbol V and a history that spans two centuries of false starts, stolen credit, and quiet industrial dominance. In 1801, a Spanish-Mexican mineralogist named Andrés…
- IronIron sits in the periodic table as element 26, symbol Fe, a metal of the first transition series and group 8. By mass it is the most common element on the whole planet, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. Yet on the surface it is…
- CalciumCalcium surrounds us in ways most people never think about. Symbol Ca, atomic number 20, it makes up roughly 3% of the Earth's crust, making it the fifth most abundant element there and the third most abundant metal, behind only iron and…
- 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…
- SiliconElement 14 makes up more than a quarter of Earth's crust by weight, second only to oxygen, yet for most of human history nobody had ever seen it in pure form. Silicon, a hard, brittle, blue-grey crystalline solid, clings to oxygen so…