I didn’t know this until now. :smack:
I always associated ‘Calcium’ with edibility and specifically milk.
I almost never associate metal with food!
When you drink milk you’re drinking metal! AHHHH!
What obvious stuff did you only find out recetnly, or at far too late an age?
Don’t forget your iron supplements.
I remember in an HG Wells book, he postulated calcium-aluminium alloys for airships of the future. There must be a reason why calcium is not used in alloys now. Too reactive? Too expensive? Supply tied up by the dairy industry? Come to think of it, isn’t limestone calcium carbonate? Yes.
Too reactive, basically. (Aluminum is also highly reactive, but it forms a tough aluminum oxide skin a molecule or two thick, protecting the bulk of the metal.)
Calcium’s one of those obnoxious metals that reacts vigorously when exposed to water, although not quite as vigorously as sodium or potassium (also metals). See here for some photos.
I remember a general rule that elements ending in -ium are likely to be metals. Not helium though. But sodium, potassium and magnesium are metals.
Salt is a rock. Chew on that.
Calcium, magnesium, lithium, sodium, potassium, etc. are all metals. However, since they are very reactive, they are not usually encountered in metallic form. In fact, many are so reactive that they react violently with water. They are therefore found either as part of a compound (e.g. sodium chloride) or in ionic form.
The calcium in your milk is not in the metallic state. It is in the ionic form.
Calcium pills are actually calcium carbonate.
So our skeletons are metal?
“Metal” to a chemist basically means that the element resides on the left-hand side of the periodic table. If you saw a hunk of pure calcium, you’d understand why- it’s shiny and metallic looking, at least before it oxidizes.
No–the calcium in your bones is not in the metallic form. It is part of an ionic compound called hydroxylapatite, which is a form of calcium phosphate.
When metals are combined into an ionic compound, they no longer exhibit metallic properties.
Pure iron is metallic (i.e. shiny and conductive). Iron oxide (rust) is not.
Pure sodium is metallic. Sodium chloride is not.
Pure calcium is metallic. Calcium compounds are not.
Hydrogen is also a metal.
A nice video on calcium, in which they talk about calcium being used in early lighting aparatus, which kind of puts a bit of truth to the old joke about filling up the headlight fluid.
I haven’t watched the video, but that’s undoubtedly calcium carbide. When you add water to it (slowly) you create carcium carbonate and acetylene. They used to use it in mining lamps – a slow drip of water from an upper reservoir on a lower container full of carbide powder produced a stream od acetylene gas that fed a flame at the center of a reflector. I have one of these lamps that a friend fished out of a lake. The calcium carbide was essentially a transportable form of flammable gas.
The iron in your breakfast cereal is tiny iron shavings. If you run a magnet over enough cereal, it will get fuzzy.
Not according to the Wikipedia:
A reminder that Wikipedia is not the be-all and end-all of knowledge.
Googling “Metallic hydrogen” gives about a quarter of a million hits. Including this one from Wikipedia:
I take that back:
The alkali metals! Very cool stuff. I find it interesting most people don’t know calcium is in the same metallic group as potassium, sodium, magnesium, etc. The heavier those elements get, the more reactive they are to oxygen (fun with water).
But yeh, as mentioned, a lot of the metals in our diet aren’t in elemental form, but are molecular compounds. That’s why a lot of people think pure calcium is a chalky, white substance… in the form of the naturally occurring calcium carbonate (CaCO3).
That the gold leafing around the brim and handle of a rarely used coffee mug, full of joe, would light up like a christmas tree, when I pop it in the mike for a warm up. Why, just this morning, in fact. :eek: