Periodic Table

Whilst read “A Short History of Everything ” by Bill Bryson I got to wondering how each of the elements were discovered. WikiPedia to the rescue. It provides a wonderful periodic table with each element linked to a wiki page containing details. Cost me almost a full days work reading through.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table

What suprised me most was how ignorant of the elements I actually was…

• Holmium – Used to create the strongest artificial magnetic field
• Indium – One of its isotopes decays to tin. Its half life is longer than the age of the universe WOW thats long and its only one of 2 elements that can wet glass
• Astatine – Has a half life of 8.5 hours. It has the shortest-lived known isotope 213At, which has a half-life of 125 nanoseconds.

Read through at wikipedia, its amazing what some of these are used in..