Curated playlist
Reducing agents
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- AluminiumAluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust, making up 8.23% of it by mass, yet for most of human history no one had ever seen a piece of it. The metal hid inside rocks, locked away in oxides and silicates, never appearing as…
- 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…
- 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…
- HydrogenHydrogen carries the symbol H and the atomic number 1, the very first entry in the catalogue of the elements. It is the lightest of them all, and the most abundant in the universe, making up about 75% of all normal matter. Stars, including…
- 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…
- BariumBarium is a chemical element carrying the symbol Ba and atomic number 56, and its story begins not in a laboratory but in a volcanic field near Bologna, Italy, sometime in the early Middle Ages. Alchemists stumbled across smooth,…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- CarbonCarbon is the element with the symbol C and atomic number 6, and it hides in plain sight inside almost everything alive. It makes up only about 0.025 percent of Earth's crust, yet it is the second most abundant element in the human body by…
- 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…