A fellow passed along two questions he thought we might be able to shed some light on. The first question was this:
Which chemical element takes its name from the Greek word for the morning star?

Remember that while the morning star can refer to any of five planets visible at dawn to the naked eye, it most commonly refers to Venus.

Our guess was copper; we based that on the fact that in Medieval Latin, the name Venus was synonymous with copper. But we were wrong, leaving our oh-so-bright correspondent in the dark.

Have all our references to light and dark tipped you off to the correct answer? Here's a hint: in Roman mythology, the morning star was personified as a male bearing a torch, and his name Lucifer meant "lightbearer." And the Greek name for Lucifer? Phosphorus, the answer to the first part of our quiz.

Now on to the second question:

Which element takes its name from an old word meaning "goblin of the mines"?

This time our first thought was of nickel. That's because the German ancestor of nickel, kupfernickel, literally means "copper goblin," a reflection of the deceptively copper-like appearance of an ore of nickel. But our experience getting burned with our first question kept us digging, and we eventually unearthed the term cobalt. The name for that lustrous silver-white element comes from the fact that its presence in silver ore was once attributed to the influence of kobolds or "goblins."