Curated playlist
Rare earth elements
- EuropiumEuropium is the element hiding in plain sight inside your television screen, your banknotes, and the glow of a fluorescent light bulb. It sits at atomic number 63 in the periodic table, a silvery-white metal so soft you can slice it with a…
- 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…
- CeriumCerium sits at atomic number 58 on the periodic table, a soft, silvery-white metal that most people have never heard of. Yet it is inside the cigarette lighter in your pocket, the catalytic converter on your car, and most of the white LED…
- 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…
- YtterbiumYtterbium takes its name from a village in Sweden called Ytterby, a place so rich in rare-earth elements that it lent its name to four separate entries on the periodic table: yttrium, terbium, erbium, and ytterbium itself. That small…
- LanthanumLanthanum carries a name that is a confession. It comes from the ancient Greek lanthanein, meaning 'to lie hidden'. The Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander chose that name in 1839 after finding the element where nobody expected it. It was…
- PraseodymiumPraseodymium gets its name from two Ancient Greek words: prasinos, meaning 'leek-green', and didymos, meaning 'twin'. The leek-green half describes its salts. The twin half hides a long confusion, because for decades praseodymium was not…
- 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…
- NeodymiumNeodymium, element number 60 on the periodic table, sits quietly inside the headphones on your ears, the hard drive in your computer, and the electric motor under the hood of a hybrid car. A few tens of grams of it can lift a thousand…
- 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…
- SamariumSamarium, element 62 on the periodic table, sits at the center of some of the most consequential technologies of the modern age. A single F-35 fighter jet contains samarium magnets. A drug built around the isotope samarium-153 targets…