How Elements Deceive

     If you hadn't caught on by now, I'll tell you again: elements are strange things and they continuously surprise scientists almost every day. Chemists know many physical features like melting point and boiling point, but when elements are study in biology, they baffle us beyond belief. Oxygen, for example, will cause flames to burn hotter and faster if it's pure. Regular air is diluted with atmospheric nitrogen. If it's not diluted, even the tiniest of sparks can ignite a terrible fire in pure oxygen. Nitrogen, however, "kills with kindness." You feel no panic, you just die, and the nitrogen shuts down your brain.
     Our immune system itself is quite amazing. Since it has to combat microbes and other living organisms, it "is more biologically sophisticated" than our respiratory system. Our body rejects any attempts to "integrate metal or wood into the body" to replace missing limbs. What Swedish doctor Per-Ingvar Branemark found is that blood cells surround foreign matter and "wrap it in a straight jacket of slick, fibrous collage." But the issue was that the body couldn't distinguish between good and bad foreign matter, even if the body metabolizes the metal. When he was testing metals he found that titanium triggered no immune response; it deceived the body for its own good. Ever since 1952, it has been used to replace fingers, teeth, and sockets.
     Even more advanced than our immune system is our 'sensory equipment' like touch, taste, and smell. The surprising thing, though, is that our sense are actually really gullible. Chili peppers in salsa irritate the same receptors that tell us to drop a spoon full of hot soup. the minty menthol in peppermint seizes up cold receptors. The tiniest bit of tellurium can leave one reeking like garlic for weeks. Beryllium tastes exactly like sugar, even though it looks nothing like it, and, with enough doses, it becomes toxic. Enrico Fermi found out that "exposure to beryllium powder can scar the lungs with the same chemical pneumonitis that inhaling fine silica causes." Fermi was using it while experimenting on radioactive uranium. He eventually ended up starting the first ever nuclear chain reaction with reacting beryllium powder and radioactive matter. But with all this exposure to the powder, he ended up with pneumonitis at age 53, stuck with an oxygen tank, and his lungs shredded.
     Beryllium tricks the taste buds for sweet and sour like miraculin, a special protein in berries. It "strips out the unpleasant sourness in foods without the overtones of their taste." It mutes the sour taste buds and puts sweet taste buds on hair-trigger alert for hydrogen ions produced by acids. Many of our taste buds, like for salty and sour, are affected by charges on certain elements. When we taste sodium, for example, our tongues detect the charge, not the element. Our mouths, in conclusion, are not very helpful for identifying elements.
     Basically, everything and every part of us is vulnerable to deception with the elements.

                            This is a picture of Beryllium...doesn't look too much like salt, does it?

Understanding the Periodic Table

Sam Kean says that to fully understand the periodic table, you must first strip away all the information and look at the basic structure of the table! (It looks like an unfinished castle!)

Take Two Elements, Call me in the Morning

     The elements in the periodic table are sometimes very complicated. They can be both toxic and life saving, depending on the circumstances. Two elements that have antiseptic powers are silver and copper, with copper being more common. It was used after America's bicentennial in 1976 when a plague broke out in a hotel in Philadelphia, with 34 dead. Copper was the simplest and cheapest way to improve conditions in the hotel. When certain fungi, bacteria, or algae come into contact with it, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupts their metabolism, and after a few hours they die. This is why many things in public places, including coins, contain mostly copper.
     Another elements, gadolinium, has become very useful in detecting tumors in MRI machines. (See video below!) It also might just be able to help provide a way to kill tumors with intense radiation. Its unpaired electrons allow it to absorb scads of neutrons, which turns it radioactive. When it goes nuclear, it shreds the tissue around it and inhibits proteins that repair DNA, so cancer cells can't rebuild their chromosomes. The problem is it can cause kidney problems, stiffening of the muscles, hardening of the skin, and breathing difficulties.
     The first genuine antibacterial drug, called prontosil, was created by Gerhard Domagk. He began quietly experimenting with it and on December 20, 1932, he injected mice with an infection caused by streptococcal bacteria, which had also infected his daughter, Hildegard, early December 1935. There were two litters, one of which had been injected with a red industrial dye Domagk had been experimenting with. On Christmas Eve, he checked the mice and found the ones injected with the dye living, while the others were dead. When his daughter's incident came up, he reached a dilemma: does he risk his daughter's life with a chance that she be cured? As her health spiraled downward, Domagk couldn't stop from thinking about the mice experiment. When her doctor announced he had to amputate her arm, he put all worries aside and injected her with the serum. Within the first couple of weeks, she worsened. But exactly 3 years after Domagk's mouse experiment, she stabilized, and she would be able to live with both arms intact. Afterwards, the drug finally went to clinical trials and it soon became a huge revelation.
     After it hit the market, it wasn't very popular. It finally gained recognition in 1936 when it cured Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. of a sever case of strep throat. However, when it was traced through the body, scientists found that it was actually a derivative of prontosil, sufonamide, that fought off bacteria. Sulfonamide is produced when mammal cells split prontosil in two, and it disrupts the production of a nutrient cells use to replicate DNA and reproduce. Thus, a Frenchman who worked on this proved that Domagk had discovered a bacteria birth control, not a bacteria killer. In 1939 he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his research, but Hitler hated this and had Domagk arrested and brutalized. He redeemed himself a little after convincing the Nazis that his drug could save soldiers with gangrene. But an even worse situation, people became obsessed with it and wanted it for every little sore throat and sniffle. This went even further downhill when quick-buck salesmen sold sulfas sweetened with antifreeze. This just proves how some people have no boundaries.

David Hahn, a 16-year-old Scientist

     The periodic table is a mysterious thing, as one boy named David Hahn found out. When he was only 16 years old, he wanted to solve the world's energy crisis and break its addiction to oil. He quickly got involved with many dangerous chemicals. His mother sent him from his room, to his basement, to the backyard shed to do his work. The backyard shed was probably a good idea since he wasn't very careful with his work. He ended up with an orange face when a fake tanning chemical blew up in his face, and one time he accidentally exploded a container of purified potassium. One of his more complicated projects was working on a reactor. He decided to build a "breeder reactor," which makes its own fuel through a clever combination of radioactive species. Even with all his work, it was later found that he wasn't nearly close to accomplishing this task.
     One day he was poking around parked cars and the police found him. They found vials of strange powder in his car and they brought him in for questioning. The case dragged on for months as nobody would claim David. In the mean times, his mother cleared out the shed, but months later a lot of radioactivity could still be found when the officials stormed the shed. Since his had no malevolent intentions and 9/11 hadn't happened yet, he was mostly let off the hook. He enlisted in the Navy right after high school. Afterwards, he bummed around in his hometown and police ended up catching him tampering with smoke detectors that had americium in them, which was used to make his neutron gun. In 2007 his mug shot was released to the media and he had tons of red sores all over, most likely from more nuclear experiments.
     It seems like some people just never learn from their mistakes. And this little story just goes to show you how passionate some scientists are about their work!

Poisoner's Corridor: "Ouch-Ouch"

     Elements in the "poisoner's corridor" ingeniously undo life. The lightest of these elements is cadmium, which was mined centuries ago from the Kamioka mines in AD 710. Japan needed zinc during the war, and it just so happens zinc mixes with cadmium in the earth's crust. After they separated the metals, the cadmium was dumped into streams or on the ground. Soon after, farmers ended up with joint and deep bone pain, kidney failure, and soft bones. After the war, a local doctor named Norboru Hagino began studying the disease. He found out that cadmium replaces zinc in the body and it evicts sulfur and calcium. Once his results went public and they were proven, the mining company began paying restitution to 178 survivors in `972. This disease was forever known as "itai-itai," which means "ouch-ouch," after the cries of pain that escaped its victims.
     Scary enough, cadmium isn't the worst poison among the elements. Below it sits mercury, a neurotoxin, and lead, thallium, and polonium are all to the right of it. These elements are subtle and can "migrate deep inside the body before going off," and because they can give up different numbers of electrons, they can mimic many other elements. Thallium, for this specific reason, is the deadliest element on the table. Once inside the body, it unstitches key amino acid bonds inside proteins and unravels the folds, making them useless. One man used it to experiment on his family, for which he was sent to a mental institution.
     These elements work so well as poisons because they are likely to form stable nuclei that never go radioactive. The heaviest almost-stable elements is bismuth, element number 83. It's a whitish metal with a pinkish hue that burns with a blue flame and emits yellow fumes. When it freezes, it expands and it forms rocks known as hopper crystals when it cools. These crystals twist themselves into elaborate rainbow staircases. A French experiment proved that "bismuth will live only long enough to be the final element to go extinct." However, it can be medicinal. It's been used to soothe ulcers, and it is the "bis" in Pepto-Bismol. On the periodic table, it "marks the transition of poisoner's corridor from the conventional retching-and-deep-pain poisons to the scorching radioactive poisons." Right after bismuth comes polonium, which causes hair to fall out. Beyond that is the noble gas radon which can displace air, sink into the lungs, and discharge lethal radioactive particles that lead to lung cancer. Pleasant huh?


The following picture is of the element bismuth, #83, when it cools and forms what is known as hopper crystals.

From Physics to Biology

     Glenn Seaborg and Al Ghiorso, from my previous blog post, "brought the hunt for unknown elements to a new level of sophistication," but they were not the only scientists discovering new elements. One man, one of the fifteen U.S. scientists named "Men of the Year," was named Emilio Segre. He discovered the most slippery and elusive element on the table. He, along with Linus Pauling, were the scientists who made two of the biggest mistakes in science history.
     Speaking of mistakes, one element, number 43, was said to be discovered more times than any other element. One time, it was just impure iridium the German chemist was looking at. Another German thought he had it but it was really just niobium- a mistake another chemist made the next year. Eventually, "davyium" was placed in box 43, but it ended up being a mix of three elements. In 1896, "lucium" was discovered, but it was discarded as yttrium. In 1909, Masataka Ogawa found "nipponium," which was a new element, just not number 43. Instead, it ended up being  element 75, but this wasn't known until 2004. In 1925, three German scientists named Otto Berg, and Walter and Ida Noddack, discovered element 75 and named it after the Rhine River. They also claimed to have found element 43, but that work was "sketchy" so scientists declared it invalid.
     In 1937, it was finally isolated by Emilio Segre and Carlo Perrier by using nuclear physics. It turns out virtually every atom of 43 disintegrated radioactively into molybdenum millions of years ago. So the Italians had American Ernest Lawrence, a colleague, make some unknowingly.
     A few years earlier, Lawrence invented the cyclotron (an atom smasher) that was used to mass-produce radioactive elements. He used it to create isotopes of existing elements. This device contained replaceable molybdenum parts. When Segre heard of this when he visited Lawrence's lab, he requested some discarded scraps. Weeks later, they arrived and his hunch was proved correct. Segre and Perrier found traces of element 43. So finally, the most frustrating gap in the periodic table had been filled.
     Segre had also been a top assistant to an Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1934. At this time Fermi reported that bombarding uranium samples with neutrons, he had created element 93 and other transuranic elements. What he had actually induced was uranium fission, but he hadn't realized it. Two German scientists contradicted his report in 1939 after he had already won a Nobel Prize. The whole lag was stunned, and Segre ended up talking about the incident in two books. However, Segre made a similar mistake around 1940 when he misidentified transuranic neptunium as a fission product. So, Fermi was rewarded for discovering the transuranic  element while McMillan was rewarded for investigating the chemistry of transuranium elements. Another one of chemistry's geniuses, named Linus Pauling, was from California. He studied quantum mechanics and figured out how it governed the chemical bonds between atoms. He also figured out that snowflakes are six-sided because of the hexagonal structure of ice. One of his projects (where he worked with sickle-cell anemia) stood out as the first time anyone had traced a disease to a malfunctioning molecule. In 1948 he showed "how proteins can form long cylinders called alpha-helices" and how the bits in proteins know what their shape is. He even came up with his own version of DNA, but this version was triple-stranded because he was using sketchy secondhand data of desiccated, dead DNA that coils up differently than live DNA. He quickly published a paper on it, which was brought to the lab of James Watson and Francis Crick by Linus Pauling's son, Peter. This paper surprised Watson and Crick since they built the same model the year before, but a colleague, Rosalind Franklin criticized it. Franklin worked in x-ray crystallography which showed that DNA was double-stranded. Watson and Crick eagerly took this data and found all their previous errors mirrored in Pauling's Paper. They want to their adviser, William Bragg, who had banned the two from working on DNA after the triple-stranded embarrassment. After they shared their new information with Bragg, they were put back on DNA. Crick wrote a letter inquiring about the phosphorous core, which distracted Pauling while Watson and Crick produced the correct model of DNA. Clever huh?
    After 1953, Segre teamed up with Berkeley scientist Owen Chamberlain and discovered the antiproton. Antiprotons "are the mirror image of regular protons: they have a negative charge, may travel backward in time, and, scarily, will annihilate any "real" matter, such as you or me, on contact." Antimatter and the antielectron was soon discovered. As for Pauling, he branched into new fields, became the world's leading anti-nuclear weapons activist, and won two unshared Nobel Prizes.

Extending the Tabe, Expanding the Cold War

     In 1950, "a notice turned up in the New Yorker's gossipy "Talk of the Town" section" that criticized how scientists were naming elements like berkelium, after Berkeley, and californium, after California. The same scientists had even outdone the supernova by creating more than the natural 92 elements. One scientist, named Glenn Seaborg, created the first transuranic element, neptunim, along with colleague Edwin McMillan. McMillan finally realized that element 93 might decay into element 94. However, soon after he was sent to work on scientific military projects, leaving Seaborg alone with everything. So, he joined up with a colleague and created element 94, plutonium, based on how McMillan had planned to complete the task. Seaborg was then summoned to Chicago in 1942 for the Manhattan Project. Afterwards, he joined up with technician Al Ghiorso and together they "discovered more elements than anyone in history and extended the periodic table by almost one-sixth." They did this by bombarding plutonium with radioactive particles - alpha particles made up of two protons and two neutrons. They discovered americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, and fermiun. When finding element 101, they had difficulties getting a large enough sample of number 99 to spray with alpha particles. After they achieved this, they had to look at what was left over after the atoms disintegrated. To detect the element, they had to run the sample to another lab miles away. After countless times, their strategy finally worked and they detected an exploding atom of element 101. They named it mendelevium and they also found element 102, nobelium, and 103, lawrencium.
     At this point, the elements were getting to big and 'uneasy' to get shot with alpha particles. Scientists from Russia tried fusing lighter elements together, after a lot of time was spent on calculating the best pairs to experiment with. Finally, Russia beat the team of Seaborg and Ghiorso to creating element 104. Seaborg and Ghiorso dismissed the results as "premature and sketchy" and they created 104 themselves. By 1969 they had it created, but by then Russia had already created 105. Both teams eventually go on the same level and created element 106 in 1974, just months apart. Then, each team started naming their own elements, a dispute that lasted until the 1990s. At this point, a point a team from West Germany had started claiming new elements. Finally, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry stepped in to arbitrate. After nine scientists were sent to each lab to investigate, they announced each team had to share credit for the elements (the same men who named elements 104-109.) Berkeley was angered they deleted seaborgium (106) from the list and protested it to change. When the final list came out it consisted of rutherfordium (104), dubnium (105), seaborgium (106), borhium (107), hassium (108), and meitherium (109).
     By the 1990s, Berkeley was lagging behind and after the Germans got elements 110, 111, and 112, Berkeley hired a Bulgarian named Victor Ninov away from the Germans. He had claimed to have made element 118 while working for Berkeley, but when it got out that he supplied false information, he was fired. However, in 1006, "an international team announced that after smashing ten billion billion calcium atoms into a californium target, they had produced three atoms of element 118." It still has to be proven, but there's no reason to think it won't hold up.

The following picture is of Glenn Seaborg pointing to the element named after him, element 106.