• Question: What is the best element?

    Asked by anon-202050 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 5 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      Rhenium. It’s incredibly rare and expensive and its like a magic dust used to make aeroplane engines work at much higher temperatures. Close second is yttrium, which is also a magic dust!

    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I’d say hydrogen since it’s so incredibly important across so many areas. It’s in stars and thus the ultimate source of all our energy. Hydrogen bonds cause our DNA to form the double helix which makes living things. It’s everywhere and for good reason

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      At the moment I am studying terbium because it has a lot of potential for cancer therapy and imaging so that’s my current favourite

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Has to be hydrogen! We mostly collide hydrogen nuclei (protons) at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for particle physics research

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Carbon is core to all life (along with water), and its electron structure means it can take an astounding array of forms. So yeah, that… especially since Meirin already took hydrogen, the particle physicist’s fave!

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      I think I’ve changed my mind to iron, it’s the base of all steels so it’s in loads of things- planes, cars, buildings, nuclear reactors…
      Plus of the iron on earth was made in a star, including the iron our blood.

      Also its the most stable nucleus, so all of the other elements kind of want to be iron too!

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