Abundance in the Universe of the elements

Natural gas is what Stefano Marani and Nick Mitchell had on their minds when they bought gas rights on this 87,000-hectare piece of land in the Free State province in 2012, for just $1.

When they had their gas finds tested, they discovered unusually high amounts of helium mixed in with the gas that mean their dollar investment could be worth billions.

Their company Renergen is almost ready to start producing both natural gas and helium, placing South Africa on an elite map with helium reserves that could be the richest and cleanest in the world.

Those first tests revealed helium concentrations of two to four percent. In the United States, helium is extracted at concentrations as low as 0.3 percent.

"That was when we knew we had something special," Marani said. "It really was right place, right time."

Further exploration has found concentrations as high as 12 percent, Renergen says. //

The global helium market was worth $10.6 billion in 2019, according to the firm Research and Markets. Since few countries produce helium, supplies are frequently disrupted.

Renergen estimates its helium reserve could be as much as 9.74 billion cubic meters—larger than the known reserves in the entire United States.

My book The Elements is based on photographs I've been collecting at my website periodictable.com for many years. The website includes not just pictures, but also more detailed descriptions than we could fit in the book, and most importantly, it includes full 360-degree rotating videos of almost all the objects. You really won't find this kind of resources anywhere else for any other subject, so please enjoy.

If you don't have the book yet, please don't think this is page is a substitute for the real thing. Aside from the fact that people buying the book (and my other photo periodic table products) is what pays for me being able to continue hosting the website, there's really no substitute for a paper book in your hands. The book also makes a fabulous gift, and you can't give a website as a gift!

Traces of rare forms of iron and plutonium have been found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, after some kind of cataclysm in outer space created this radioactive stuff and sent it raining down on our planet.

The extraterrestrial debris arrived on Earth within the last 10 million years, according to a report in the journal Science. Once it hit the Pacific Ocean and settled to the bottom, nearly a mile down, the material got incorporated into layers of a rock that was later hauled up by a Japanese oil exploration company and donated to researchers. //

In his view, the new findings add to other evidence that the heaviest elements, such as plutonium, can't be generated by just regular old supernovas. "It must be some rare event, something else," says Schatz. "There are a lot of pieces of evidence that point to multiple sources. Neutron star mergers are probably one of the more important sources, but at this point it doesn't look like they can explain all the observations."

Titanium - The Metal That Made The SR-71 Possible

In the periodic table of elements there is one golden rule for carbon, oxygen and other light elements: Under high pressures, they have similar structures to heavier elements in the same group of elements. But nitrogen always seemed unwilling to toe the line. However, high-pressure chemistry researchers of the University of Bayreuth have disproved this special status. Out of nitrogen, they created a crystalline structure which, under normal conditions, occurs in black phosphorus and arsenic. The structure contains two-dimensional atomic layers, and is therefore of great interest for high-tech electronics. The scientists have presented this "black nitrogen" in Physical Review Letters.

This page looks at the reactions of the Group 2 elements - beryllium, magnesium, calcium, strontium and barium - with air or oxygen. It explains why it is difficult to observe many tidy patterns.