Elementary DDNG LTTRS Trivia Quiz

Answer: Neon Xenon

Despite its name, which is derived from the Greek for "new", neon was discovered in the late 19th century along with its fellow noble gasses radon and krypton. It has the atomic number 10 and is the second lightest noble gas after helium. In theory you could fill a balloon with neon and get a similar effect to a helium balloon - it would rise and stay up in the air (albeit more slowly than a helium one) but would be considerably more expensive due to the processes required to extract it from air. Instead you are more likely to find it in red illuminated signs.

Xenon is another noble gas that is used in lighting, in particular in flash lamps and in arc lamps used in the process of film projection. It is also used as an anaesthetic - but I wouldn't recommend trying to inhale xenon gas from the movie projector, even if the film does bore you to the point of desiring to be unconscious.

Answer: Barium Bromine

Barium is a alkaline earth metal from group 2 of the periodic table. Most people are likely to have come across it in the form of the compound barium sulfate, which is used in "barium meals" to provide the opaque contrast necessary to use x-rays to examine the digestive system.

Bromine is a member of the halogen group of elements that forms a foul-smelling reddish-brown liquid at room temperature. It was discovered in the 1820s and commonly used as a sedative until the early 20th century. Ingesting too much bromine can lead to a condition known as bromism that caused psychiatric problems and skin rashes, so it shouldn't be surprising that its medicinal uses have become much more limited.

Answer: Helium Holmium

Helium has the lowest boiling point of all the chemical elements and is therefore a gas at temperatures above about -269 degrees Celsius. While helium is famous for being ideal for filling balloons, more common uses of helium include cryogenics, welding, pressurising systems and creating controlled atmospheres. Its inertness and the fact that it remains in gas form at low temperatures are the key factors that make it so useful.

Holmium is a rare-earth element that has the highest magnetic field strength of all elements so, unlike some other members of the lanthanide series, it has a number of practical uses, including the generation of magnetic fields.

Answer: Niobium Nobelium

Niobium is named after Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus in Greek mythology. It appears just above tantalum (which is named after Tantalus) in Group 5 of the periodic table. Niobium is generally used to make alloys - it is widely used in steel production, but is also an important component of so-called 'superalloys' found in aircraft engine components, turbo chargers and the US's Apollo spacecraft.

Nobelium is one of several elements named after famous scientists - in this case Alfred Nobel, of dynamite and Nobel Prize fame. It has the atomic number 102 and its official discovery is credited to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in 1966. It is a relatively short-lived radioactive element, as most of its isotopes have a half-life of only a few minutes.

Answer: Thulium Thallium

Thulium has the chemical symbol Tm and the atomic number 69 (making it a member of the lanthanide series). It is a very soft silvery-grey metal (you can cut it with a knife) that was first discovered in Sweden in 1879. The name thulium comes from Thule, a far-off northern place from myth that is often associated with Iceland, Greenland or regions of Scandinavia. It is used in portable medical x-ray devices and some types of laser.

Thallium (atomic number 81) was discovered independently by Claude-Auguste Lamy and William Crookes in the early 1860s and named after the Greek word for a green shoot of a plant. The connection to green comes from the colour of its emissions when analysed using spectroscopy rather than its outward appearance (it is a grey metal). It is highly toxic and was used historically as rat poison. Its subsequent use as a murder weapon gained it the nickname of the "Poisoner's Poison".

Answer: Polonium Platinum

Polonium is a radioactive element discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in the 1890s and named after Marie's home country of Poland. It gained some notoriety in 2006 when it was used as a poison to assassinate the former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, who had obtained asylum in the UK.

The two chemical elements whose names include the consonants 'PLTNM' are platinum and plutonium. The former is a precious metal with a silvery appearance that is located next to gold in the periodic table and is commonly used in jewellery. The latter is highly radioactive and much more commonly found in nuclear reactors. It also formed the core of the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan at the end of the Second World War.

Answer: Erbium Terbium

Erbium and terbium (along with yttrium and ytterbium - another pair of elements that differ by a single consonant when their vowels are removed) are named after the Swedish village of Ytterby, where minerals containing several rare elements were first discovered.

Erbium has the atomic number 68 and is a member of the lanthanides. It is used in lasers developed for the medical and dental industry and as erbium oxide it forms pink crystals that are particularly handy for making pink-coloured glass. Terbium is also a lanthanide (with atomic number 65) and also has practical uses related to its colour - terbium oxide is green and commonly used to make the green phosphors needed for green fluorescent lighting.

Answer: Indium Vanadium

Indium is named after the colour indigo, as it produces a deep indigo colour under spectroscopy. It sits in group 13 of the periodic table (otherwise known as the boron group) and is categorised as a post-transition metal - ones that tend to be very soft or brittle. Its main use is in the production of LCD screens.

Vanadium was first discovered in 1801 by the Spanish-Mexican scientist Andres Manuel del Rio and named erythronium from the Greek word for "red". However, his work was incorrectly discredited and it was another 30 years before vanadium was rediscovered by the Swede Nils Gabriel Sefstrom and named after the Norse goddess Freyja (also known as Vanadis). It is a particularly hard metal and is often used as an alloy for the purpose of strengthening steel.

Answer: Uranium Rhenium

Uranium was discovered in 1789 and is one of the more famous radioactive elements on the periodic table. The isotope uranium-235 (which has the benefit of being both fissile and naturally occurring) has had widespread use as the fuel for nuclear power stations as well as in the somewhat more dangerous field of nuclear weapons.

Rhenium is a more recent 20th century discovery and is one of the last stable (non-radioactive) elements to have been successfully isolated. It has very high melting and boiling points (in the top three of all the elements) and as such has a variety of uses in very hot situations, such as jet engines.

Answer: Osmium Samarium

Osmium is an extremely dense silvery-blue metal with atomic number 76. It is found in platinum ores but is relatively rare and has few practical applications compared to other shiny metals. One use is as an alloy to create hard-tipped pen nibs, while osmium tetroxide (whose unpleasant smell led to osmium being named after the Greek for "a smell") has been used for tissue staining in microscopy.

Samarium was discovered in France in 1879 and named after samarskite, the mineral from which it had been isolated. Samarskite was first found in a Russian mine and named after the Russian mining engineer Vassili Samarsky-Bykhovets - making him the first person to have their name given to that of a chemical element. Samarium is used to make magnets and catalysts, while some radioactive samarium isotopes are used in various cancer treatments.