Curated playlist
Transition metals
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- NiobiumNiobium sits quietly in the periodic table at atomic number 41, carrying two names, a century of mistaken identity, and a reach that extends from the steel in modern cars to the magnets inside MRI scanners. Its symbol, Nb, is a compromise.…
- PlatinumPlatinum sits at atomic number 78 on the periodic table, but its story stretches back to pre-Columbian South America, where native peoples worked it into artifacts before European science had even named it. Its very name comes from the…
- 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…
- Mercury (element)Mercury is the only metallic element known to be liquid at standard temperature and pressure. Cool it below 4 K and it became the first known superconductor, discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. Pour it into a wooden statue, and…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- SilverSilver carries the chemical symbol Ag and the atomic number 47. That symbol comes from argentum, the Latin word for the metal, and it hides a small mystery. The Germanic and Balto-Slavic names for silver, including Old English seolfor,…
- PalladiumPalladium, the silvery-white metal with atomic number 46, carries a name born from astronomical discovery. When the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston jotted notes about a new noble metal in his lab book in July 1802, he was reaching…
- RhodiumRhodium carries the symbol Rh and the atomic number 45, and it holds the distinction of being among the rarest and most valuable metals on Earth. In 2016, a single troy ounce could be had for less than US$700. By 2021, that same ounce had…
- TantalumTantalum sits quietly inside almost every smartphone, laptop, and camera you have ever owned. Its atomic number is 73, its symbol Ta, and its name carries a curse from Greek mythology that turns out to be strangely fitting. What makes a…
- 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.…
- IridiumIridium carries the symbol Ir and the atomic number 77, and it answers to a name borrowed from a goddess of the rainbow. Smithson Tennant pulled it from a dark, stubborn residue that other chemists had dismissed as graphite. The salts he…
- GoldGold carries the chemical symbol Au, from the Latin aurum, and the atomic number 79. It is one of the least reactive elements known, sitting second from the bottom of the reactivity series, with only platinum ranked as less reactive. A…