Periodic

Aqua Regia, Royal Water, is a mixture of two acids, hydrochloric acid and nitric acid. The reason it’s called ‘royal water’ is because it dissolves gold. Gold has fascinated people for thousands of...

Europium is an element which, when you excite the atoms or excite the electrons in the atoms, gives out very nice red coloured light. Ok, so europium is pretty much in the middle of the lanthanide...

Ok so promethium is actually my least favourite lanthanide because I can’t actually work with it. It’s highly radioactive and at any one time on the earth’s surface there is not an awful lot of it so...

Ok so gadolinium is smack-bang in the middle of the 4f series. It’s perhaps most famous for the fact that it’s used as a contrast reagent in MRI machines. So if you need a full body scan, a doctor...

So this is a very, very special sample of lutetium. Again from the bottom end of the periodic table, the lanthanides, and you can see it’s a really quite beautiful metallic foil here. So lutetium is...

So here you can see we have a very thin foil sample of dysprosium. Again it is from the bottom end of the periodic table, very, very reactive. Stored very, very carefully as a foil. Now if we open,...

Technetium is the first element in the periodic table which is naturally radioactive, so it is the lightest radioactive element and so for a long time very little was known about it. Now people are...

So this is a sample of ruthenium sponge. So the ruthenium metal has been precipitated to form very fine particles. So here we will just open the box I am rather ashamed that I made a big mistake about...

So this sample, it’s a very, very interesting sample; it’s arsenic. So this is quality arsenic. So arsenic used to much more common in the community than it is nowadays. It was used as a pigment in...

The Periodic Table is an arrangement of chemical elements ordered by atomic number. It was designed by Dmitri Mendeleyev as a way of presenting all the elements to show their similarities and...