{"id":3281,"date":"2012-02-14T09:59:07","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T09:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/?p=3281"},"modified":"2012-02-14T09:59:07","modified_gmt":"2012-02-14T09:59:07","slug":"element-of-the-month-cool-as-helium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2012\/02\/element-of-the-month-cool-as-helium.html","title":{"rendered":"Element of the month: Cool as helium"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month<\/a>\u2019s \u2018in your element\u2019 article<\/a> (subscription required) is also<\/a> a winning entry from last year\u2019s competition<\/a>. Christine Herman, known on Twitter at @CTHerman<\/a>, a PhD student at the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois <\/a>at Urbana-Champaign, who also likes to write about science \u2014 for example she contributes to C&En’s Just Another Electron Pusher<\/a> \u2014 shares why she loves helium.<\/p>\n

In 1868, astronomers Jules Janssen and Norman Lockyer \u2014 who was about to found a certain Nature<\/em><\/a> journal \u2014 both noticed (independently) a bright yellow line in the spectrum of the Sun that could not be accounted for by known elements. The suggestion that this line might come from an element present in the Universe but so far undiscovered on Earth seemed bizarre at first, but was to be later unambiguously backed up. Luigi Palmieri detected this element in 1882 in Mt Vesuvius\u2019 lava, and William Ramsey managed to isolate it in 1895 by treating a sample of the uranium mineral (cleveite) with sulfuric acid, liberating helium that had been produced by the radioactive decay of uranium.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s perhaps no wonder that this noble gas wasn\u2019t noticed earlier \u2014 it is, after all, colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic, and escapes easily from the Earth\u2019s atmosphere so that its concentration is only about 0.0005% by volume. It does however get trapped under the surface, usually with natural gas, and this is where we get the helium we need.<\/p>\n

And need it we do, not just for balloons and squeaky voices at parties. You already know this if you\u2019re, among other things, a paleontologist, a deep-sea diver or an arc welder; read Herman\u2019s article<\/a> to find out more.<\/p>\n

She does make a fair point \u2014 helium is<\/em> cool. So much so that many scientists in many fields (for example physics and medicine but also nuclear energy applications) use it as a cryogen. And if you go down to temperatures below 2 K, helium becomes downright bizarre and very intriguing: it adopts a superfluidic state that has no viscosity but a very high thermal conductivity. It is also enticing to chemists who, undeterred by its inertness, keep trying to combine it with various elements. Some of these \u2014 excited dimers rather than actual compounds \u2014 went on to find a use in lasers.<\/p>\n

And, as if helium wasn\u2019t exciting enough in its own right, antihelium observed<\/a>\u00a0last year<\/a>\u00a0made for the heaviest anti-particles produced so far. All in all, colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic element 2 is very far from dull.<\/p>\n

Anne<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anne Pichon (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month\u2019s \u2018in your element\u2019 article (subscription required) is also a winning entry from last year\u2019s competition. Christine Herman, known on Twitter at @CTHerman, a PhD student at the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who also likes to write about science \u2014 for example she contributes to C&En\u2019s Just Another Electron Pusher \u2014 shares why she loves helium.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":326,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anne-pichon","category-in-your-element"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/326"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}