Out of Elements

I worked on one of my favorite articles and infographics for the June 2010 issue of Popular Science, on the elements that we couldn’t do without. It brought back memories of high-school and college chemistry, and the infographic itself involves a periodic table.

It was interesting to even think of the fact that we do kind of take elements for granted…after all, they’re elements; if we actually ran out, it’d be kind of hard to find more (barring a few that resulted from extremely slow nuclear fusion/fission reactions, the vast majority were incorporated into the Earth’s crust during the Earth’s formation..). Also, many elements do have unique properties, so it’s kind of hard to even find substitutes for them, although there’s certainly research going on to do just that.

Thankfully, nothing’s really running out anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues when it comes to extracting elements in ways that makes economic sense. And not all countries have equal access, so it becomes a political issue as well.

There was in fact lots of recent news about whether the US had the mines and the technology to ensure supplies of the ‘rare earth elements’ (which aren’t that rare, but are unequally distributed and essential for a lot of high-tech industries). China appears to have both the most currently accessible mines, and the necessary human and technological resources to exploit the resources (so much so that one expert told me even if the US mined them, they’d have to send them to China to be processed). And similar issues can be found for a number of other elements.

Anyway, all of that is just a preamble to the PopSci article, Out of Our Elements (yes, I came up with that play on words 🙂

The web version is nice, and the text is mostly the same, but it doesn’t really capture the original infographic, so I’m attaching a small picture of it below.

The periodic table is based on Theodore Gray’s. Hhe writes a regular section in Popular Science called Gray Matter.

You can check out his Periodic Table site, as well as links to his Elements book and other merchandise. He basically got a sample of every single element in the periodic table in its pure form, so you get to actually see what each element looks like.

The website doesn’t do justice to how beautiful many of them look, and Theodore Gray’s descriptions of each one are highly entertaining–he actually manages to give each element its own personality, which seems quite difficult, when you think about it 🙂 The book is pretty amazing, well worth checking out at a bookstore.

And his Ipad app has been getting rave reviews, so much so that Apple features it on its App website (incidentally, just below Popular Science’s app, which also looks very cool and also seems to be very popular.)