Curated playlist
Reducing agents
- EuropiumEuropium is a metal so soft you can slice it with a kitchen knife. It also glows red inside color television screens.
- DysprosiumDysprosium got its name from a Greek word meaning "hard to get." A chemist needed over thirty tries in 1886.
- ZincAncient brass makers had no idea they were using zinc. The zinc metal vaporized in copper furnaces before anyone saw it.
- CeriumPrimo Levi bartered a stash of lighter-flint alloy for food at Auschwitz.
- PotassiumPotassium is a metal soft enough to slice with a kitchen knife. Dropped in water, it bursts into a lilac-colored flame.
- TerbiumTwo elements, erbium and terbium, have had their names switched since the 1800s. Nobody has corrected it.
- AluminiumAluminium is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust, yet for most of history no one had seen any.
- LanthanumLanthanum is named for the Greek word for "lie hidden". Carl Gustaf Mosander found it in 1839 inside cerium nitrate.
- PraseodymiumPraseodymium spent decades hidden inside a supposed element called didymium. An Austrian chemist split it in 1885.
- ManganeseIn 1972 the CIA used manganese mining as cover for a secret ship mission.
- HydrogenHydrogen makes up about 75% of normal matter, yet nobody recognized it until the 1760s.
- BerylliumBeryllium, a metal that can kill people who breathe its dust, forms mirrors in the James Webb Space Telescope.
- BariumBarium was first noticed in glowing stones near Bologna, Italy. The pebbles glowed in the dark for years.
- ErbiumErbium, a rare metal, turns water rose-pink when its ions dissolve. It is used inside fiber-optic cables.
- NeodymiumNeodymium hid inside another metal for decades. Chemists took it for one element, didymium, until 1885.
- GadoliniumGadolinium is toxic as a free ion, yet doctors inject it into veins. A protective wrapping makes it safe enough for MRI.
- CalciumPure calcium metal burns skin the moment you touch it. Yet the same element holds your skeleton together.
- MagnesiumWater makes burning magnesium burn worse. The metal rips water apart, releasing hydrogen gas that feeds the flame.
- SamariumSamarium is the first element named, indirectly, after a person. The honor went to a Russian mining chief.
- CaesiumCaesium is the element that tells the world what a second is. Since 1967, the second has been defined as 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave light tied to a transition in caesium-133 atoms. The metal behind that number is a soft,…
- SodiumSodium, the element with the symbol Na, revealed itself in 1860 from the far corner of a 60 cubic metre room. There the chemists Kirchhoff and Bunsen set off 3 milligrams of sodium chlorate mixed with milk sugar, as far as possible from…
- BoronBoron, the element with the symbol B and atomic number 5, owes its existence to events far from any laboratory. Stars do not build it in their cores. Instead it arises when cosmic rays break apart larger atoms and when supernovas explode.…
- CarbonDiamond, despite the slogan, should slowly turn into graphite. Only a high energy barrier holds the change back.
- LithiumLithium, the element with atomic number 3, is soft enough to cut with a knife and light enough to float on water. Its density is just 0.534 grams per cubic centimeter, the lowest of any metal under ordinary conditions. Only sodium and…
- SiliconSilicon clings to oxygen so tightly that chemists failed for decades to pull them apart.
- HydrazineHydrazine is a colorless, flammable liquid with an ammonia-like smell, and its formula, N2H4, joins just two nitrogen atoms to four hydrogens. In the novel The Martian, which was also adapted into a feature film, the stranded main…