http://www.sciencealert.com/this-aw...ls-you-how-to-actually-use-all-those-elements This awesome periodic table tells you how to actually use all those elements Americium could save your life. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Thanks to high school, we’ve all got a pretty good idea about what’s on the periodic table. But whether you’re looking at something common like calcium, iron, and carbon, or something more obscure like krypton and antimony, how well do you know their functions? Could you name just one practical application for vanadium or ruthenium? Lucky for us, Keith Enevoldsen from elements.wlonk.com has come up with this awesome periodic table that gives you at least one example for every single element (except for those weird superheavy elements that don’t actually exist in nature). There’s thulium for laser eye surgery, cerium for lighter flints, and krypton for flashlights. You’ve got strontium for fireworks, and xenon for high-intensity lamps inside lighthouses. Oh and that very patriotic element, americium? We use that in smoke detectors. First unveiled in 1945 during the Manhattan Project, americium is produced by bombarding plutonium with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. The resulting americium is radioactive, and while the tiny amounts of americium dioxide (AmO2) used in smoke detector produces alpha radiation to sniff out a fire, it will deliver approximately zero radiation to anyone living nearby. I kinda want to tell you all about rubidium and how we use it in the world’s most accurate time-keeping devices, and how niobium can help make trains levitate, but you should just check out the periodic table for yourself.
For a junior high school science fair, I once embarked on filling a poster sized periodic table equipped with pouches with a sample of each element, accompanied with a rather thick write up containing elemental properties and electron configurations and usage. After the science fair was over, I noticed someone had snitched the droplet of mercury, some antimony and some arsenic. No idea why they nipped those particular ones. Eventually, I lost interest in collecting them, but usage still fascinates. Thanks!
This chart is so old they apparently hadn't discovered H or He yet. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It doesn't really "sniff" out fire however. It just creates a closed circuit with alpha particles and an alpha particle detector. When that circuit is interrupted by smoke an alarm goes off. Curium is the last element with any practical use (so far). Curium was used to power a satellite that wasn't going to be coming back into Earth's orbit so elements 97-118 are just curiosities at this point. Gallium is interesting in that it is one of the few materials that expand upon cooling. It is liquid at some room temperatures. If you store it in a glass vial, the vial will break when it cools due to the expanding. Gadolinium loses it's magnetism at room temperatures. I too find this an interesting subject. For fun I learned all of the elements and then bought a book which told several main uses for each element.
Dysprosium, Praseodymium, Technetium, Astatine...I'll bet there might be a few more that don't roll off your tongue all that often. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I actually have some gadolinium at home. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Any room on the chart for Cowplatma? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Poe. Don't tell Humpty I asked. Thanks.
