Whats Your Favourite Element On The Periodic Table, And Why?

[Guest]

26 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

I'm into biochem as that is my bachelor's degree. I detested inorganic chemistry as well as physical chemistry even though the latter is important. I don't even get why we need to study an isotope that doesn't exist in nature other than in books like the one below?

I don't need to study that awks

[Drak3]

Oxygen

Ununpentium

[Silentprototipe]

Neptunium, Obviously  

 

 

Neptunia ftw  

[DildorTheDecent]

Titanium, best metal. stronk

[Eduard the weeb]

 

I hate sodium and chloride because every CS GO and Overwatch match I get so much off it

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Actually every competitive game lol

Edited February 2, 2018 by Eduard the weeb

[Ashiella]

Astatine

[Bhav]

6 hours ago, 8uhbbhu8 said:

Agreed with Bismuth

 

 

Agreed with 8uhbbhu8.

 

 

[Arika]

Which ever one got spilled on me 10 years ago that makes me read minds

[Sauron]

8 hours ago, Cinnabar Sonar said:

Hydrogen, since that's what I, and the rest of you are mostly made of.

That's not quite correct

despite the higher number of hydrogen atoms in water compared to oxygen, their mass is almost 16 times lower.

 

Personally I'd go with carbon for its flexibility.

[mikat]

carbon, hydrogen and oxygen since i'm made out of them

[Tiberiusisgame]

5 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That's not quite correct

despite the higher number of hydrogen atoms in water compared to oxygen, their mass is almost 16 times lower.

 

Personally I'd go with carbon for its flexibility.

Beat me to it. Definitely carbon. We live and die by it.

[Bhav]

15 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That's not quite correct

despite the higher number of hydrogen atoms in water compared to oxygen, their mass is almost 16 times lower.

 

Personally I'd go with carbon for its flexibility.

Its such a confusing topic this. I misheard in one of Biology lectures that the body contains mostly carbon, maybe it was by mass not percentage.

 

Then Im in a pub with people who I used to know, aceing the trivia questions gambling machine thing.

 

A question comes up asking what the body contains most of - Hydrogen, Oxygen or Carbon.

 

I instantly press Carbon before anyone else can press Oxygen thinking 'I am so smart, watch me bedazzle these numpties' ....

 

YOU LOSE, THE CORRECT ANSWER IS OXYGEN.

 

Im pretty sure I lost all my 'friends' in that instance, hence 'people who I used to know'.

 

I think its:

 

Hydrogen is highest by number of atoms

Oxygen is highest by percentage

Carbon is highest by mass

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, Bhav said:

Its such a confusing topic this. I misheard in one of Biology lectures that the body contains mostly carbon, maybe it was by mass not percentage.

 

Then Im in a pub with people who I used to know, aceing the trivia questions gambling machine thing.

 

A question comes up asking what the body contains most of - Hydrogen, Oxygen or Carbon.

 

I instantly press Carbon before anyone else can press Oxygen thinking 'I am so smart, watch me bedazzle these numpties' ....

 

YOU LOSE, THE CORRECT ANSWER IS OXYGEN.

 

Im pretty sure I lost all my 'friends' in that instance, hence 'people who I used to know'.

Pretty sure that graph is in percentage of mass, perhaps you misinterpreted the statement "we are a carbon based life form" to mean "we are mostly carbon".

 

Here's the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body

[Bhav]

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Pretty sure that graph is in percentage of mass, perhaps you misinterpreted the statement "we are a carbon based life form" to mean "we are mostly carbon".

 

Here's the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body

See the edit I added.

 

And actually I remember specifically what I misinterpreted. 

 

The statement in microbiology that 'every cell in human body is composed mostly of hydrocarbon chains'.

 

I now want to shoot any lecturer / teacher that utters that sentence. 

[Sauron]

Just now, Bhav said:

See the edit I added.

Well it's not true, oxygen is first by mass. The percentage is just a mean of comparing the mass of oxygen to the total mass of your body. Saying "oxygen has the highest total mass of all elements in your body" and "oxygen makes up the highest percentage of your body's mass" is the same thing. The graph's description states

Quote

The main elements that compose the human body are shown from most abundant (by mass, not by fraction of atoms) to least abundant.

 

[Bhav]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Well it's not true, oxygen is first by mass. The percentage is just a mean of comparing the mass of oxygen to the total mass of your body. Saying "oxygen has the highest total mass of all elements in your body" and "oxygen makes up the highest percentage of your body's mass" is the same thing. The graph's description states

 

See the other edit I added in my now last post, and yes I was wrong.

[Hackentosher]

I like carbon, it makes a lot of cool shit 

[ATFink]

Carbon and Silicon.

 

Both have 4 valence electrons that allow incredibly strong and/or complex bonds to form. This allows them to be some of the most versatile pure elements in existence for mankind (again, this is because of their 4 valence electrons).

 

Simply doping Si with boron, cutting it into wafers, and heating some phosphorus into one of the sides of the wafer is the very basic beginning stages of creating a mono-crystalline solar panel (the most efficient single junction panel in existence today). Silicon's bad gap is ~1.1eV which happens to low enough for visible light (1.8eV to 3.1 eV) and some infrared to knock electrons off Silicon's valence electron band. Silicon's low band gap also allows it to be a decent to very good material in most solid state transistors. This makes is very adept with application that are related to electronics in pretty much every way. My uncle owns a mosaic tile business and that wouldn't exist without silicon because glass contains silicon. Also beaches. Silicon is in sand and beaches are nice.

 

Carbon can make (relatively) large and very strong crystalline structures of all shapes and sizes. It is one of the backbones of the double helix structures of DNA. Apparently carbon would be a great solar panel material (like silicon) if the panel was near a source of electromagnetic radiation that registered ~5eV of energy (very low frequency ultraviolet light). This band gap can very according to the structure of the carbon though. Graphene, buckyballs, carbon nanotubes, graphite in many things from pencils to motor brushes, fossil fuels for energy, C02 in the atmosphere to keep us warm, and even life as we know it wouldn't be possible without carbon.

[Skanky Sylveon]

30 minutes ago, CUDA_Cores said:

Actually by mass very little of us is made of hydrogen. 

 

It is true that the most abundant molecular compound in our bodies is water, but hydrogen is only 1.008 g/mol while oxygen is around 16.00 g/mol. In other words, water is only around 11% hydrogen by mass, meaning that because we are about 66% water, we are actually mostly oxygen by mass. 

 

Think about it this way. A 100Kg human (for the sake of easy numbers) would have approximately 11Kg of hydrogen, but a little over 58Kg of Oxygen assuming a 66% ratio of water to rest of human. 

 

See mom, I did learn something in my college chemistry class!

I was referring to the number of molecules.

If we are talking about mass, then it would be Oxygen, then Carbon.

 

Edit: I meant to say number of elements.

[Skanky Sylveon]

10 minutes ago, CUDA_Cores said:

Water is a compound, not a molecule. 

Well, technically it's a molecular compound, but i'll use your wording.  

11 minutes ago, CUDA_Cores said:

If hydrogen was the most abundant molecule, then that would mean 66% of us would be H₂

One water compound is 2 hydrogen, and one oxygen.

While, yes the oxygen part is much heaver, there is only one.

 

That would mean, if we had, say 1000 water compounds, then your body would have 1000 oxygen atoms, and 2000 hydrogen atoms.

 

I used the wrong wording before.

[captain_to_fire]

17 hours ago, Sauron said:

That's not quite correct

despite the higher number of hydrogen atoms in water compared to oxygen, their mass is almost 16 times lower.

 

Personally I'd go with carbon for its flexibility.

I think he's pertaining about the nuclear fusion of hydrogen and helium that happened billions of years ago that gave birth to the stars and the resulting nuclear fusion resulted to other elements.

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Cinnabar Sonar said:

Well, technically it's a molecular compound, but i'll use your wording.  

One water compound is 2 hydrogen, and one oxygen.

While, yes the oxygen part is much heaver, there is only one.

 

That would mean, if we had, say 1000 water compounds, then your body would have 1000 oxygen atoms, and 2000 hydrogen atoms.

 

I used the wrong wording before.

The table is pretty dumb and confusing. It means percentage of mass, rather than percentage in body, so there is your confusion.

So we do have a lot of hydrogen. A LOT. Many times more than oxygen.

However oxygen is a very weighty molecule, it accounts for more of our weight.

Think of ourselves as big bucket and you are at the beach. You have some stones and sand in the bucket, the stones weight a lot more than the sand but the sand is much more numerous in the bucket.

[Skanky Sylveon]

1 minute ago, RorzNZ said:

The table is pretty dumb and confusing. It means percentage of mass, rather than percentage in body, so there is your confusion.

So we do have a lot of hydrogen. A LOT. Many times more than oxygen.

However oxygen is a very weighty molecule, it accounts for more of our weight.

Think of ourselves as big bucket and you are at the beach. You have some stones and sand in the bucket, the stones weight a lot more than the sand but the sand is much more numerous in the bucket.

That was exactly what I was getting at.  Thank you for explaining it so well.

[mr moose]

Call me boring and old fashioned, but I like Iron. 

[vanished]

19 hours ago, Ashiella said:

Astatine

17 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Call me boring and old fashioned, but I like Iron. 

well that's awfully boring and old fashioned