the.com/vanadium
the metal named after a beauty goddess that quietly makes your car not snap in half
means A hard, silvery-grey metallic element (symbol V, atomic number 23) used mainly to strengthen steel into tough alloys.
from Named in the 1830s by the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström after Vanadís, a name for the Norse goddess Freyja — chosen because the element's compounds form such a beautiful range of colors. The same root gives us 'Vanir,' the Norse gods of fertility and beauty. Fittingly, the metal had been spotted earlier by a Mexican mineralogist, Andrés Manuel del Río, who called it 'erythronium' before being talked out of his discovery.
- goddess name
- named for Vanadis, Norse goddess of beauty
- color show
- its solutions flaunt four distinct vivid colors
- steel secret
- tiny amounts make tools dramatically tougher
- sea creatures
- some tunicates hoard it in their blood
- battery future
- flow batteries store grid energy in liquid vanadium
minas gerais vanadium deposits — brazil holds the world's largest vanadium reserves with ~7 million metric tons
bushveld complex — south africa's vanadium-rich geological formation, produces ~40% of global vanadium
vanadium redox battery — large-scale energy storage system deployed at king island, tasmania since 2015