the.com/lanthanide
Seventeen elements so alike chemists spent decades failing to tell them apart.
means Lanthanides are the fifteen (sometimes counted with scandium and yttrium as seventeen) rare-earth elements from lanthanum through lutetium, whose nearly identical chemistry makes them notoriously hard to separate and identify.
from From 'lanthanum,' the first-discovered of the group, which itself comes from the Greek 'lanthanein' meaning 'to lie hidden' or 'escape notice' — a Swedish chemist named it that way in the 1830s because the element kept slipping past detection, hidden inside another mineral. The suffix '-ide' marks it as a chemical family. Fittingly, the whole lanthanide group inherited that name of concealment, since its members spent the next century hiding from each other in chemists' analyses, nearly impossible to tell apart.
- rare earth myth
- not actually rare, just hard to separate
- phone ingredient
- power your screen, speakers, and vibration motor
- counting quirk
- often grouped with scandium and yttrium too
- magnet secret
- neodymium magnets are stronger than any natural material