Hi.
You're listening to Cultivate Curiosity, a
podcast.
That inspires the next generation to stay
curious.
Cultivate Curiosity is brought to you by
the Emerald Coast Science Center, a
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Interactive science museum and steam
educational facility in Fort Walton Beach,
Florida.
This podcast is perfect for anyone curious
about the world we live in because.
You never know what we'll talk about
next.
Hi, I'm Harley, an educator and the
community affairs coordinator.
Hi, I'm Jacie. I'm social media coordinator.
And hi, I'm Diane. I'm the director.
And today we're going to talk about
one of my favorite things, my party
favor that I give out anytime I
get to go speak at the Kawanas
or the Rotary Club or something like
that the periodic table. And I'll tell
you why this is. One of my
favorite things to talk about is because
I think that we do a really
bad job of talking about the periodic
table. And I think when we teach
it to kids in schools, we just
make them hate it. But if you
really think about what the periodic table
actually is on a single sheet of
paper, you are holding everything we know
about everything in the universe, right?
There is a list of ingredients of
what it takes to make the whole
entire universe living things, nonliving
things. Stars, oceans, animals,
trees. I mean, it's all there on
that single sheet of paper. And nobody
appreciates what the periodic table
actually is because I think the way
we teach it is like, oh, you
have to remember, hydrogen has one proton
and one electron. It has an atomic
mass of this, and it has these
many isotopes. And that's the boring way
of talking about the periodic table. The
periodic table is a living, breathing
document, and we encounter it in
everything that we do in our lives.
We just don't think about it the
right way. And there's so many incredible
stories wrapped up in how the periodic
table came to be. And those are
some of the things that we want
to point out and highlight today is
talk about some of those great stories
inside of the periodic table. So this
is like the ultimate achievement of
knowledge of everything that we know is
written right here on a single sheet
of paper. And it's universal. Universal in
the sense that it looks the same
in any language. Helium is helium. It
has the chemical symbol of he. It
doesn't matter what language you're
reading it in or you're talking about
it in or what country you're in.
It is always helium. It's always spelled
the same, always has the same chemical
symbol, always has the same atomic number,
atomic mass. All of those things, they
don't change.
Same number of protons, same number of.
Exactly these things are constants. So
again, I get super excited about the
periodic table. So you could probably tell
that already I'm dragging Harley and Jacie
along with me today. They have some
really cool things to share as well.
So great. So we sort of laid
the foundation for the periodic table,
which was pretty much everybody calls
Dmitry Mendelev the father of the periodic
table. And he put this thing together
in 1869. So that's been over 150
something years. But in 2019 they
celebrated the 150th anniversary of the
periodic table. And so that was the
international year of the periodic table
of chemical elements. That was just an
incredible thing for us as a whole
world celebrating the periodic table in
2019. And I know Jacie's got a
couple of things she wants to share
about some of our favorite periodic tables
that you're going to find in the
notes for today's podcast.
So we have the first one from
Compound Interest. So these were actually
from the 150th anniversary. They came out
with a variety, I think you said
like 20 something, an advent calendar.
Yes. So 24 different periodic tables.
Yes. So that's really awesome. You can
actually find all those on their website,
compoundchem.com. We'll link it. They
also have a Facebook, Instagram and
Twitter @compoundchem as well. So just
check that out. In general, they have
a lot of really great ones. They
put something out for women's history as
well, which is this month too. So
they have a lot of really cool
ones.
And then we also will have a
link to my very personal favorite periodic
table. Well, and the reason why I
really like that one is it's colorful,
it's bright, but it also shows you
where you would encounter each one of
these elements in your everyday life,
which I think makes it very translatable
and applicable and makes you understand
how oh, yeah, that's right. I do
use this every single day of my
life. So we're going to start out
and do like 30,000 foot overview of
the history of the periodic table. And
it starts with one of my all
time favorite scientists. Okay. Partially
because he just has such a beautiful
name when you say it, Antoine Laurent
Levosier. So he was considered to be
the father of chemistry. He was one
of these gentlemen scientists. So if you
think in the 1617 hundreds, the people
that were scientists were the people that
had a bunch of money and they
could create their own laboratories within
their homes and they just studied science,
they were curious and they were just
natural phenomenon and things and so
that's what they did. But the reason
why I like him, he has a
great story. So he was a really
rich French dude and he married a
14 year old girl. Her name was
Marie Ann. And the thing about it
was, is that she herself was a
very intelligent young woman and she
worked with him as his laboratory partner
for all of these years. And she
worked with him with all of his
experiments. And he designed all of this
very incredible delicate glassware that he
used in his experiments. He was considered
to be one of the people that
came up with the first list of
elements and he also named hydrogen and
oxygen. So he was just this really
incredible scientist. But he had one small
mistake in his life. He was part
of something called the General Farm,
which was an organization that from the
king of France was given the opportunity
to collect taxes. And so during the
reign of terror in France, when they
got out La Guillotine and they went
after all of these people that were
in the government, the masses did. And
so his life was cut short because
he was part of this taxing organization
and he was actually one of the
last people to be executed by the
guillotine in France. So I can't imagine
how many more discoveries that he could
have made had that not been the
outcome that he had. And fortunately, his
wife was not murdered in that fashion.
But see, there's great stories embedded in
the periodic table. I bet we told
a bunch of high school kids, hey,
one of these guys was guillotine in
the French Revolution. Kids would be like,
what? Tell me that story. So again,
like I said, he was one of
the ones that really centralized and
codified a lot of chemistry terminology
and experimentation and science in
general. Then later on there was a
German physicist that also worked on
determining the molecular weights or the
atomic weights of elements. And he had
published a list at an international
conference in Germany in 1860. That point
they concluded that hydrogen would be
assigned the atomic weight of one and
the atomic weight of all the other
elements would be relative to hydrogen. So
they said, well, carbon is twelve times
heavier than hydrogen, so carbon would
have an atomic weight of twelve. And
then there was a British chemist, John
Newlands, that arranged the elements into
a periodic table in an increasing order
of their atomic masses. And he found
that every eight elements had similar
properties. So he called that the law
of octaves and we still hear about
that today. So he arranged the elements
in eight groups, but he didn't leave
any gaps for any undiscovered elements.
And that's one of the things that
Dimitri Mendelev did was when he looked
at it and he looked at the
elements that we knew existed and he
printed them out on cards, and then
he kept rearranging the cards to come
up with the design of the periodic
table, leaving gaps and spaces, because he
knew that we didn't know everything. He
predicted the discovery of other elements
as well. And so of course that
was in 1869. And then later on
some of those elements were discovered
which then gave credibility to his version
of the periodic table. And the 105th
element in the periodic table was named
Mendelavium after him. And he has a
really good story too, because he was
like, I think, the youngest of twelve
kids, and he and his mom hiked
from one side of Russia to the
other side so that he could go
to university. And like, as soon as
they got to St. Petersburg, his mom
died. So he was just this young
man by himself and went and studied
chemistry and later on developed the
periodic table. So when the United Nations
decided to celebrate the 150th anniversary
of the periodic table in 2019, their
thought processes and their quote on why
they chose to do that was the
periodic table of chemical elements is
more than just a guide or catalog
of the entire known atoms in the
universe. It is essentially a window on
the universe, helping to expand our
understanding of the world around us.
All right, so let's talk about how
elements are named. There have been many
new elements added to the periodic table.
Science textbooks around the world have
become suddenly out of date because of
this, and there have been four new
chemical elements added and a big decision
now lies ahead. Elements 113, 115, 117
and 118 need to be given their
official names and symbols. New elements
can be named after mythological concept a
mineral, a place or country, a property,
or a scientist. The names have to
be unique and maintain historical and
chemical consistency. This means a lot of
yums. The most recent tradition has been
to name them after places or after
people. The places chosen tend to be
where the element was discovered or first
manufactured. The sweetest village of
Iterby has managed to get four named
after it, and we'll talk about those
later. And no one has yet named
an element after themselves. But many
elements are named in tribute to important
scientists. Albert Einstein was given
Einsteinium. This can also be a way
of righting the wrongs of the past.
Eliz Meitner, we'll talk about later was
really the chemist who spotted nuclear
fission. But she was never really
recognized for it because she was Jewish
and a woman. To be able to
give an element a name that reminds
us of her is a great way
to share that importance. The naming
process also isn't very quick. The
scientists who discovered them will start
things off by proposing a name. But
it will be down to the International
Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, or
Iupac, to approve it. A special division
of the US based group has to
accept the proposal. There is then a
public review period of five months before
Iupac council gets the final approval.
Once it's ready, the name is announced
in the scientific journal Pure and Applied
Chemistry. Scientists sometimes get
creative with their names. Mythical names
have proved popular. Prometheum was named
after a character from a Greek legend
who stole fire from the gods to
give to humans and was punished by
being chained to rock so an eagle
could feed on his liver. The name
was meant to reflect the fact that
synthesizing new elements often requires
sacrifice. There is hidden meaning in the
table, as in the naming of presodium
and neodium. They replaced didium
wrongfully thought to be an element, but
in fact a mixture of the two.
And then naming an element is not
about functionality. There's a tremendous
romance to this. Names are always very
important.
So I'm going to piggyback on Lisa
Meitner for just a minute because I
think this is another one of those
great stories that it's embedded inside of
the periodic table. So, as we just
said, she was German and she was
Jewish, and she grew up in Germany.
She was actually an Austrian citizen, but
she grew up in Germany and she
studied physics. Well, at this point in
time, women didn't study physics. Her
family had to hire a private tutor
to tutor her in physics because none
of the schools in the area would
have accepted her as a student. So
she eventually went on to become a
professor. She actually worked with Mox
Planck, so if you've ever remember
Planck's Constant. So she actually worked
with him in Germany. She eventually became
his laboratory assistant. And there she
met her longtime friend and the person
that she collaborated with, whose name was
Otto Hahn. And they discovered some new
isotopes together, and they moved to the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1912. She was
working without pay because she wanted to
do the work, and they weren't going
to pay a woman to do it.
And then in 1917, they finally granted
her her own physics lab. In 1923,
she pinpointed the case of a strange
emission of electrons from excited atoms.
And this phenomenon is known as the
Auger Effect, after a French scientist,
Pierre Auger, who also discovered it that
same year. But he got it to
be named after him and not her.
And then she became the first woman
in Germany to hold a full professorship.
And when she moved to the University
of Berlin in 1926 and she headed
a research program in nuclear physics,
which.
Is her time frame, the same time
frame as Marie Curie, just different
areas.
She was a little bit later. Yeah,
because Marie Curie got her first Nobel
Prize in 19 three, and she's in
the 19 she's like, in the 1930s.
Got you. And this was a really
exciting time for physics because they had
only discovered the neutron in the 1930s.
So there's no nuclear chemistry until you
start taking into effect, like, neutrons.
And then once you can start looking
at neutrons and you can start talking
about nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.
And so everybody was trying to create
this trans uranium elements, which is
elements that are heavier than uranium is.
And there was this huge international
quest that was going on at the
same point in time. Like this idea
had come. The time had come. So
all of these different scientists are
working on it so Ernest Rutherford was
in England working on this project. And
element 104 on the periodic table is
named after him. Irene Jode Curie was
in France. And this is Marie Curie's
daughter, who later on went on to
win a Nobel Prize of her own.
Enrico Fermi was in Italy and he
has element number 100 named after him.
And then Meitner and Han were working
on this problem in Germany. So you
can see these are some really big
names. I mean, they're on the periodic
table of elements. So you know that
this was a huge time in this
research field. Well, so we're in the
1930s and we're in Germany, so we
all kind of know what's going to
happen next is that Hitler comes into
power in Germany in 1933 and it
becomes very hard for women, it becomes
very hard for Jewish women particularly.
And all of her friends kept telling
her that she needed to leave, she
needed to leave Germany. And she kind
of hung out a little bit too
long. And at the very end she
left. And she had like $10 and
a diamond ring that her friend had
given her to use to sell so
that she would have some money when
she finally got out of the country.
So it was that desperate the times
were. So then she left and she
went to go to Stockholm, Sweden, where
she worked with Niels Bohr. Neil's Bohr
Boreum element 107 on the periodic table
and also the namesake of our newest
sugar glider, Neils. So shout out for
that one. But she continued working with
Otto Hahn in Germany. Secretly they were
working on this idea of nuclear fission,
which is where decay particles why would
something like uranium over time become
less? And that's because it was fission
and that things were breaking apart. And
in 1939, of course, this is during
the height of World War II or
leading up to World War II, otto
Hahn wrote this paper and he submitted
it and it was accepted to the
journal. And he completely left her out
of it. She'd been doing this research
for all of these years. She had
been working in Sweden and sending him
information back. And he uses information
in this paper and oopsie, he gets
a Nobel Prize from that and she
got nothing. Exactly. So I think that
when we talk about they were saying
that this was a great way to
honor someone who had been overlooked, who
had made great contributions, but had been
overlooked. And so that's why they decided
to name the element Mitrion after her.
So I like that story. So again,
just another cool historical story that
kind of comes out of the periodic
table of elements.
So to finish off our podcast for
today, we've got some periodic table jokes
and puns for you and then a
couple of different elements that we just
find to be our favorite. You guys
maybe have heard some of these jokes
before? Maybe not. Who knows? For one
of them, two guys walk into a
restaurant. One guy says, I would like
some H2O. The other guy says,
I would like some H2O too. The
waiter delivers the drink, and the second
guy dies after drinking his. Who knows
why, but hydrogen peroxide is
H2O2, and H2O is water. Don't
drink hydrogen peroxide, friends. Another
one. This one is kind of funny,
especially if you are aware of your
chemical symbols. Sodium, sodium, sodium,
sodium, sodium batman. Sodium's chemical
symbol is NA.
You have to go nana nana nana.
NA.
No, you say sodium. All right, chemist
number one.
Do you have any sodium bromate? Chemist
two nabro. Again, just more chemical
symbols. Sodium is NA, bromate is BR,
and then an O for oxygen. One
question for you. What did the chemist
say when he found two isotopes of
helium? Answer He He. Final one for
you. What does a good doctor do
for his patients? He heliums. Just some
of my favorite little jokes. Maybe you'll
remember, maybe not. I probably won't
remember any tomorrow. Some of my favorite
periodic table elements, they all seem to
fall under the alkali earth metals. Just
maybe a coincidence. I don't really know.
I again referenced Diane's favorite
periodic table, the one she mentioned
earlier. The elements. Wlonk.com. This one
is great. The pictures are wonderful. The
alkaline earth family is the second most
reactive group, and its elements can't be
found free in nature. They're called
alkaline earth metals because they form
alkaline solutions, hydroxides, when they
react with water. Earth was the alchemist
term for the oxides of the alkaline
earth metals. So if you're looking at
your periodic table, it's like the second
row. One of my favorite one of
the alkaline earth metals is magnesium.
Magnesium is essential for plant growth,
which I love plants. Magnesium is the
central core of the chlorophyll molecule
in plant tissue. Thus, if magnesium is
deficient, the shortage of chlorophyll
results in poor and stunted plant growth.
Magnesium also helps to activate specific
enzyme systems. And enzymes are complex
substances that build, modify, or break
down compounds as part of the plant's
normal metabolism. So a little bit more
specific if you're really curious. Mg two
plus is the central atom of the
chlorophyll molecule and fluctuates. And
its levels in the chloroplast regulate the
activity of key photosynthetic enzymes. So
it's all within the process of
photosynthesis. Another one of my favorite
elements is beryllium, and this one
catches my eye quite literally.
beryllium's name comes from the mineral
barrel. Barrel beryllium aluminum
silicate, which its compound is really
long. It makes up a whole range
of glittering gemstones, such as
aquamarine, hilliodor, and the most well
known, which is emerald. And emerald is
so pretty. It's my favorite. It was
from emeralds that Beryllium as an element
was first discovered that the stone might
harbor a new element that was suspected
in about the 18th century, nicholas Louis
Vaquilin was first to confirm the presence
of beryllium in emerald, but he has
been unable to separate from its oxide.
30 years later, about in 1928, the
metal was isolated, and this person
extracted it from beryllium chloride by
reacting it with potassium. Emeralds were
known to the ancient Egyptians, Romans and
Celts. Their beautiful green color comes
from traces of chromium vanadium, and they
are rarer than diamonds. Now, they're very
pretty, but they can also be a
little scary and a little dangerous.
Beryllium has known biological role, and
indeed, it can be harmful to the
human body. Brief exposure to a lot
of beryllium, or extended exposure to a
little will bring on the incurable lung
condition known as bareliosis. It is also
listed as a category One carcinogen. And
however, the tiny amount in the average
person of around 00:35 milligrams presents
about no health risk. And then my
final favorite element, maybe not my
final, but just for sake of time,
calcium. You could say there are electrons
in the shells, literally. There are two
in the first electron shell, eight in
the second electron shell, another eight
in the third shell, and two in
the fourth and outermost shell of calcium.
That's if you're looking at it more
scientifically. But shells are also made
of calcium carbonate, real shells that we
find out in nature. All mollusks build
their own shells, whether they live in
the water or on land. Those are
creatures like snails, clams, oysters,
mussels. And they use an organ called
a mantle to secrete layers of calcium
carbonate, which crystallize and then
harden.
And so I have a few favorites
as well. My first one is atrium.
It's a silver metallic transition metal
chemically similar to lanthanides and has
often been classified as a rare earth
metal element. itrium is almost always
found in combination with lanthanide
elements and rare earth minerals and is
never found in nature as a free
element. It is the only stable isotope
and the only isotope found in the
earth's crust. And so this was named
after iterbite, a mineral first identified
in 1787 by the chemist Carl Arinius.
He named the mineral after the village
itterbee in Sweden, where it had been
discovered when one of the chemicals in
iterbite was found to be previously
unidentified atrium. The element was named
after the mineral, and we said there
was a couple of other ones diane
that are named after.
So, yeah, the Iterbee is a town
in Sweden, and these materials came out
of a mine nearby there. And it's
the only town that has four elements
on the periodic table named after them.
So itrium Turbium herbium, and itribium
cool.
The reason why I like this is
it's because it is actually in lasers.
So I don't know if you guys
know, but we have a glow forge,
and it uses lasers. So that was
kind of cool. And then my last
one is cadmium. It's a soft, silvery
white metal that is chemically similar to
the two other stable metals in Group
Twelve, zinc and mercury. It was
discovered in 1817 simultaneously by
Strawmeyer and Herman, both in Germany, as
an impurity in zinc carbonate. This is
kind of a toxic element. We use
it less because of that. It's in
batteries, so we actually use nickel
cadmium batteries, and then we're
replacing them with nickel metal hydride
and lithiumion batteries. But one of its
few new uses, which I assume is
much safer, is that it's in Cadmium
telleride solar panels. Do you have any
favorites, Diane?
Of course I do. Okay. The whole
entire periodic table.
Pick one.
No, that goes without saying. I really
like when we look at the ones
that are man made, which we make
in these particle accelerators, and we
smash things together in order to make
these, and they have a really super
short half life. But I love to
look at the names of them and
especially across the very bottom of the
periodic table because there's
Americarium, there's Berkeleyum, and
there's California. So I always say, can
you guess what university did a lot
of this research? And obviously, of
course, it's the University of California
at Berkeley. And, you know, last week
we talked about the One Tennessean, which
was the one that one of our
African American scientists worked on. And
so again, it goes back to that
thing of, like, if you discover it,
you get to sort of name it.
But again, Iupac has to approve your
name before it actually goes forward. But
no, I challenge you guys to grab
a copy of any periodic table and
take it out and just look at
it and think about how wonderful it
is and how incredible it is that
we know all of the things that
we know and can distill them into
this single sheet of paper. Everybody
should carry one around with them and
do like, a little periodic table scavenger
hunt, like, pull it out in the
morning. Okay, I'm going to go look
for something that contains neodynium
today or something like that. And it
would be kind of fun and just,
I think, just brings wonder and joy
into your lives.
I definitely think it's very different,
the teaching it and then seeing all
these different variations, because
usually you just look at it, you
see the numbers and you see symbol,
and that's it. You're looking at it
to be like, what is this on
my test? Or something.
I recently seen some teachers try to
teach it by allowing the students to
create their own version of the periodic
table with whatever sort of thing that
they truly enjoy. So like Pokemon. And
they have to establish the groups and
the rows and the columns and number
them and give them atomic symbols and
give them atomic numbers. And I think
that's also a really fun way to
teach it because then it sparks their
interest of what they already like, but
also they have to reference something to
make their project. So I think that's
super cool.
Like a blank page with numbers and
letters and actually mean something to
them.
Exactly.
Okay, well, I think that is all
for our Periodic table podcast. We'll see
you in two weeks.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to this week's
episode of Cultivate Curiosity.
If you have any questions, feel free
to email us at socialmedia@ecscience.org.
Tune in for our next episode in
two weeks.