Holmium seems to be right up in “snooze button on a smoke alarm” territory as far as usefulness goes.
But without Holmium Oxide Filters it would be harder to calibrate UV-vis spectrophotometers! :eek:
Yes, what a drooling idiot you are! How could you forget that?
(Says me, who has forgotten pretty much every scrap of organic chemistry knowledge from college.)
Only 20 kg of scandium are used in the US yearly.
…can I really use epoxide to describe that intermediate? Or is wikipedia’s mechanism wrong? (Thanks for bringing it up… I had never thought about the mechanism.)
Bushchenium seems to be particularly useless, and both common and highly toxic.
I think wikipedia is right and that’s definitely not an epoxide. However, that mechanism is probably why I was thinking of an ozonolysis-type reaction. But you can kinda see the similarities between it, ozone, and peroxide epoxidations.
Europium complexes can be used to change chemical shifts for proton NMR.
Francium would have to be up there in terms of uselessness as well.
Wow, I guess I got lucky when I did a similar assignment and got astatine (which is a critical component of type metal alloy, owing to its uncommon property of expanding on freezing).
Europium is also used as a tracer in so-called time-resolved fluoroimmunoassays (TRFIA).
A variety of Eu(III) chelates (other lanthanides are also employed in similar fashion) are also used in fluorogenic assays where a tracer is needed for some chemical, often a short peptide or other such biomolecule.
Does Radon have any practical use?
(Besides providing a market for radon detectors, of course.)
I love his Natural Sample of 78% Pure Nitrogen…
Astatine doesn’t even have any uses listed on the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Periodic Table site.
I’ll be charitible and assume you forgot what forum you’re in. Don’t do it again. Political shots don’t belong in GQ.
samclem
That was my thought as well - well, I thought it would be one of the noble gasses and reading through cmyk’s link I settled on Radon as the worst of that lot
Fuck me, I’m a :wally
In my home state, Maine, where there’s lots of granite, radon is a particular problem, as granitic igneous rocks have relatively high concentrations of U (not nearly high enough to mine, of course), which decays into Ra, which decays into Rn. There’s always a brisk business in Rn detectors for your basement there.
Anyway, there was also a vibrant manufacturing economy, especially paper, and throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the mills dumped huge amounts of nasty chemicals all over the place, especially rivers. Some of these nasty chemicals leached into soil and made their way into the groundwater, and happen to be volatile (sundry toxic organics, mostly). A person with a porous foundation living near a mill or a waste dump might encounter an unhealthy buildup of these chemicals in their basement as well. I recall hearing that some contractors were using Rn as a surrogate for determining if relevant households were at greater risk for such hazards.
Astatine does not occur naturally - an explicit requirement of the OP.
Sure it is. The page you link to merely states that it CAN be synthesized, not that synthesizing it is the only way to get it.
Oops. You are correct. My apologies.
Radon is used at least to some degree in radiotherapy - I’m guessing that they use it, ironically, against lung cancer.