• Question: What is your favourite element?

    Asked by igloo23 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 19 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Carbon. Without it we wouldn’t exist. It has amazing properties and can make millions of different molecules. Plus pure carbon can make different structures like graphene (which is amazeballs), buckyballs (which are amazene) and diamond.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Carbon! Diamonds are a girls best friend! (Also useful for, y’know, being alive.)

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Oooh I think oxygen is pretty useful! 😉

      I think the story of Helium – how it was discovered first in the Sun (hence the name – helio being greek for Sun) is pretty interesting.

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Oxygen. It can be really cool.

      When it is turned into a liquid it is a blue colour (a bit like the I’m a scientist website).

      As a gas, we need it to live but it loves other elements and will try and oxydise them: like rusting iron or combining with hydrogen to make water.

      And water is obviously pretty fantastic, not only are we made mostly of water but a lot of things dissolve in it (it is a solvent) and it is weird too: when it solidifies into ice, it is lighter than the liquid which is unusual.

      Let’s not forget that we need oxygen to burn things (oxidation again) and one of the first videos I saw on the internet (waaay back in 1996) was liquid oxygen used to create super barbecues, like this one,

      Back to O2 and sometimes it instead makes O3 or Ozone which is a nasty gas at ground level (you get it from cars and laser printers) but in the sky it protects us from harmful UV rays.

      So I vote for Oxygen!

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