April 21, 2009
Just What Is Ytterbium Anyway?
The Last Page column (our funny page) in Smithsonian’s May issue is dedicated to people who missed the cut for Macarthur “Genius” Grants. An example:
STAN LINDBERG — EXPERIMENTAL CHEMIST
Forging new frontiers in chemistry as he seeks to be the first man to consume every single element of the periodic table. In addition to holding the North American record for mercury poisoning, his gonzo account of a three-week ytterbium bender in the December 2001 issue of Science (“Fear and Loathing in the Lanthanides”) has become a minor classic.
This got me wondering: Just what is ytterbium anyway?
Ytterbium (chemical symbol Yb, atomic number 70) is a soft, silvery white metal found in minerals such as gadolinite, monazite and xenotime. It is a rare earth element and as the Science article indicates, a member of the lanthanides on the periodic table.
The element is one of three (three!) named after the Swedish town of Ytterby, which the guys from the Periodic Table of Videos visited in their recently updated video about ytterbium:
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I can’t find the article “Fear and Loathing in the Lanthanides” in the December 2001 issue of Science or anywhere in the Science archive. “Stan Lindberg” gets no hits on their search. Google only turns up a reference to Smithsonian’s last page article.
You, and I, have been played. After not finding the article, I read the other blurbs more closely. Their obviously fake. Its a pure fiction piece. That’s too bad, I was hoping to use the article for a class I teach.
[...] at the University of Nottingham in England, and in their Sixty Symbols project (a companion to the Periodic Table of Videos) they are producing videos explaining various symbols used in physics and astronomy. [...]
[...] let them have these videos. Last week, The Periodic Table of Videos (I’ve shared their ytterbium and hydrogen videos in the past) celebrated one year on YouTube by baking a cake in the lab (first [...]
Are there any traces of YTTERBIUM in Ocean Waters of the world ?