Elemental Roll-Call

Inspired by posts from JessTheChemist and the esteemed Dr. Lowe, I've tallied mine below.
(N.B. I came up in an organometallic lab where we made many precursors from scratch...)

Hydrogen (obvious)
Helium (carrier gas)
Lithium (Li-Hal exchange)
Carbon (Darco)
Nitrogen
Oxygen (ozonolysis)
Sodium
Magnesium
Aluminum (form'n Friedel Crafts salts)
Sulfur (mercury spills)
Chlorine (oxidant)
Argon
Potassium (N-K form'n)
Manganese (reductant)
Iron (reductant)
Nickel (Ra nickel)
Copper (forming amalgams)
Zinc (organozincs, reductant)
Bromine (distilled, even...yuck!)
Palladium (hydrogenation, salts)
Silver (foil, to make salts)
Indium (reductant)
Iodine
Cerium (cross-coupling...failed)
Samarium (to make SmI2)
Platinum (hydrogenation, catalysts)
Gold (dissolve in aqua regia)
Mercury (old pressure eqpt)

So, I count 28. Pitiful against 118, but a varied lot nonetheless.

Turning Over Rocks, Drawing Lines in the Sand

When I flip over a rock in the woods, I'm never quite sure what I'll find. Bugs? Fungi? A gold coin? (maybe someday...).

Turning over rocks in the dense forest of the chemblogosphere gets complicated quickly. My response to this week's chemistry-opposed Washington Post article included a barb near the end: 'correctly' stating the number of elements in the Periodic Table to counter a WaPo assertion:

"...there are 92 naturally-occurring elements, and a total of 118 spots (not all filled!) in the Periodic Table. I didn't have to Google it, because I took middle-school chemistry."

Now, of all the things I've written on this blog, I'd hardly expect this to seem controversial. And yet, within a few minutes, Stu Cantrill had chimed in, favoring 94...then 98. Blog of the Isotopes posted next, saying:

"The question is not at all easy to answer.  It depends what you mean by naturally-occurring.  I think the common meaning is "can be dug up from the ground but didn't come from man-made sources such as weapons fallout."  So, how many is that?"

Although the author didn't commit to a number, he seemed to lean towards the 94-98 that Stu had claimed. Other websites (WiseGeek, Yahoo! Answers) claim anywhere from 88 to 117!

Prof. Per-Ola Norrby weighed in via Twitter; originally favoring 90, he increased his bid to 92, and dug up primordial elements, which geophysicists peg at 84. Most recently, frequent JLC commenter gippgig argued:

"Make that 94 elements, 88 of which occur in significant amounts"

84? 88? 90? 92? 94? 117? That's a lot of different numbers for something we theoretically "know." After a while, I decided to update my original post with a dreaded tilde: the half-baked punctuation mark of the undecided.

Why rehash this rather academic debate? Because it's really important! The conversation illustrates the value of scientific discourse, where individuals find facts, bring them back to the table, and everyone weighs the information. Skeptical eyes inform conclusions - do I think that that "fact" holds water? Sam Arbesman wrote an entire book on this topic, The Half-Life of Facts, showing that research uncovers its share of "inviolable" truths we discover later just aren't so.

So we draw lines in the sand. Include radioactive isotopes? Include stellar chemistry? What's your detection limit? Measurement technique? Where's your cutoff? How many atoms?

An old joke - ask ten organic chemists what "large scale" means, and you'll get ten answers. The 2012 Chemistry Nobel Prize blurred whole fields; where do chemistry and biology divide? Do they? For my part, I'm settled in on 94 'natural' elements for now, but I could be swayed depending on further data.

Perhaps most importantly, I again recommend chemistry class to all Middle Schoolers, painful or no. Thinking through these types of problems really helps you grow, and isn't that what school is for?

Elemental Beer

It's October, which means falling leaves, football, cider, und Oktoberfest. Cracking open my copy of the latest WIRED Magazine last night, I came face-to-face with a full-page ad for Bud Light Platinum:

Source: Anheuser-Busch

Now, I understand the idea: an expensive noble metal speaks to the supposed quality of this latest beer offering. But it got me thinking - How often do you see element-themed noms de booze?

Let’s examine the obvious first. For the last few NFL seasons, Coors Light has run a promo with a speeding train called “The Silver Bullet.” Care for something else? Maybe some Molsen Golden, or anything from the Coors brewery in Golden, CO. With the help of Google and Beer Advocate, we’ll stray a little farther afield for a few more periodic pints…

Dieu du Ciel Helium, Montreal, Canada

Lithia Beer, West Bend, WI

Mount Carbon Beer, Pottsville, PA

(I know it’s cheating a bit, but how about the nitrogen Guinness rocket / widget?)

Gordon Finest Titanium, Scotland

Barney Gumble holds a
'Hassium Hefeweizen'

Fuji No Kina Vanadium Beer, Nigata Brewery, Japan

Carling Chrome, Molson Coors UK

Iron City Beer, Pittsburgh, PA

OMB Copper, Mecklenberg, NC

Arsenic, Belgium

Tsingtao Selenium-Riched 8, China

Krypton Rye PA, Victoria, BC, Canada

Tungsten Strong Lager, England

Tin Roof Beer, New Orleans, LA

There’s a brewery in Richland, WA called Atomic Ale, located just down the street from an historical plutonium reactor*. The ambience has apparently rubbed off; their beer roster includes Plutonium Porter, Seaborgium 106 Scottish Ale, Dysprosium DunkelWeisen, and Proton Pale Ale.

Surprisingly, several apt elements seem to have no brew to call their own. Quaff a Rubidium Red? A Lanthanum lambic, or maybe a Germanium Doppelböck? Americium Amber, Indium Pale Ale, Barium Brown…these things just write themselves!

Readers, have I missed any other elemental beers? Have any suggestions for ones you’d like to see?

Update (10/6/12) - How about elemental breweries? Telluride Brewing Co., Element Brewing Co.

*Several folks have commented that I might be grossly oversimplifying the importance of the Hanford site, akin to calling dinosaurs "those prehistoric dragons," or the Super Bowl "the last football game of the season." My apologies; I'll look deeper into it, and plan a follow-up post.

Friday Fun: Kevium

Kids, come closer, so ol' Uncle See Arr Oh can tell you about life in the '90s. See, back then, a postage stamp only cost $0.29, and "the Net" was still something you connected to with a modem!

Kevin French, from Mission Hill
(Warner Bros, Oakley / Weinstein)

I recently came across my Amazon dream sale: the entire Mission Hill series - all 13 episodes - for only $9.00. You may remember Mission Hill as the quirky, colorful cartoon show that was part of the [cough] original Adult Swim lineup on Cartoon Network, almost 15 years ago.

I had completely forgotten about the wacky uber-geek younger brother, Kevin French. He's the foil to cool older brother Andy, a struggling cartoonist in Boston. But, as the series progresses, you learn that Kevin's pretty cool, especially by today's standards: he loves science and math, plays online computer games, and gets into hilarious scrapes by trying to view the world through a rational lens. Kind of like The Big Bang Theory...but animated.

I also forgot that Kevin has a huge poster in his bedroom of "Kevium," supposedly element 108; this really shows the show's age, since 108 wasn't officially Hassium (Hs) until 1997! (I'll assume the producers did enough background research to notice Fr was already taken). As for those numbers on the bottom? Beats me. I guess they're supposed to be ionization energies or isotopic masses, but I think they just scribbled 'em in.