the.com/manganese
the metal that turns steel unbreakable and pretends it never showed up
means A hard, brittle gray metallic element (symbol Mn) essential to making strong steel and found in many ores, batteries, and even your own body in trace amounts.
from A wonderfully tangled name. It traces back to 'magnesia,' a term medieval miners and alchemists used loosely for various dark mineral lumps — itself probably from Magnesia, a region in ancient Greece rich in strange ores. Over time two different black minerals got jumbled under this name, and to tell them apart people corrupted one form into 'manganese' (via Italian and French), while the other gave us 'magnesium' and 'manganese' as separate twins of confusion. So the metal is essentially named after a place by way of centuries of mineralogical muddle.
- steel's bodyguard
- makes steel hard, tough, and crack-resistant
- battery brain
- powers most lithium-ion cathodes you carry daily
- cave artist
- colored prehistoric black cave paintings
- named wrong
- name twisted from magnesia, a Greek region
- body essential
- required trace mineral, yet toxic in excess
groote eylandt — australian island with one of world's largest manganese ore deposits, producing ~3 million tonnes annually
gabon manganese — gabon is world's third-largest manganese producer, primarily from moanda mines
south africa manganese — world's largest manganese reserves in northern cape province, supplies ~30% of global production