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Greetings fellow nerds.
I have here a one gram sample of pure ruthenium metal.
It's very useful to a professional inorganic chemist,
but has limited use for an amateur.
Nonetheless it is very interesting because it's almost impervious to most acids.
Let me show you.
Here it is immersed in hydrochloric acid.
As you can see, the acid has no effect on it.
Now I've got it in some nitric acid.
Still totally unscathed.
I didn't film it, but it also has no reaction to sulfuric acid.
Now I'll pull out the big guns
and hit it with a mixture of both hydrochloric and nitric acid.
This mixture of of acids is known as aqua regia and can dissolve gold.
But as you can see here the ruthenium doesn't even flinch.
Even with direct heating the metal is completely invulnerable to the aqua regia.
Those bubbles are the acid decomposing, not the metal.
Here is the bead and as you can see it's completely untouched.
I weighed this with a precision scale
both before and after my destructive tirade but it lost no mass,
meaning it is truly invulnerable.
Not to be defeated, I finally found it's Achilles heel
with a an extremely simple household chemical - bleach.
The yellow product is a mixture of ruthenate and perruthenate ions.
The bubbles are a combination of oxygen and extremely toxic ruthenium tetroxide gas.
So do not perform this experiment yourself without a proper fume hood.
Anyway, this shows you the rock-paper-scissors nature of chemistry.
This metal, ruthenium, is impervious to some of the strongest acids in chemistry.
But is instead brought down by the simple household chemical of bleach.
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