What is your favorite element?

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Thanks for all the great ideas, folks!

Here's my favorite: carbon.

Aside from being critical for earthly life, and maybe most or all life anywhere, it's remarkable for the fact that it forms into many different solid forms with very different properties.

Diamond
Graphite
Amorphous carbon
Fullerenes such as Buckeyballs and Buckeytubes

It's radioactive form 14C is very useful for dating objects on earth and its stable 13C isotope is very useful for various analytical methods, such as NMR.

 

[thatmanMIKEson]

Rubidium? :) :)

https://andremueller.e-junkie.com/product/1584238
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubidium

 

[TheBiochemist]

Very funny thread! :) I vote for palladium as its electrocatalytic properties are cool and I have spent a large part of my postdoc working on the use of Tsuji-Trost reactions in bioorthogonal therapy.

 

[thatmanMIKEson]

Very funny thread! :) I vote for palladium as its electrocatalytic properties are cool and I have spent a large part of my postdoc working on the use of Tsuji-Trost reactions in bioorthogonal therapy.

Lol let me break out the ol dust Webster so I can follow along.. :)

 

[monkeyCmonkeyDo]

Uh. Salt. Lol.
That's an element right?
Lol
D

 

[Piscans]

Uh. Salt. Lol.
That's an element right?
Lol
D

 

[monkeyCmonkeyDo]

Nope it's not. Lol
D

 

[thatmanMIKEson]

Nope it's not. Lol
D

It is to me that was a good one!!!!!!!!

 

[Crustaceon]

Heart!

 

[LeftyReefer]

My favorite is the element of surprise.

 

[Mike Marsh]

I don't trust elements. They make up everything and hydrogen is the worst.

 

[steveschuerger]

Copper, cause without it you can’t have Spock

 

[Nonya]

Let’s have some fun!

What is your favorite element, and why?

I’ll start different threads in upcoming days on least favorites, as well as chemicals (as different than elements; phosphate is a chemical, P and O in phosphate are elements).

You might like gold or platinum for looks, helium for balloons, lawrencium if your name is Lawrence, etc.

So what’s your favorite element?

I've been a favorite of oxygen all my life. Not only is it an element, but it's also a molecule. How fun is that?

 

[Mr_Knightley]

Cadmium... It's just so fun to say.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I've been a favorite of oxygen all my life. Not only is it an element, but it's also a molecule. How fun is that?

Hard to argue with that!