Twitter has a reputation as a time sink and a cesspit for political bickering (and worse), but for the past few days I have been watching something really lovely unfold across the platform, under the #ElementTales hashtag.
The project began when Mark Lorch, a chemist and science communicator at the University of Hull, UK, posted this tweet:
Hey #chemtwitter folks! Who’s up for an element association game for #PeriodicTableDay in #IYPT2019.
The rules:
I’ll start with an element, you reply with a story/factoid that links it to another element and so on… No repeats!#elementTales— Prof Mark Lorch (@Mark_Lorch) February 7, 2019
Lorch got the idea while developing a version of the periodic table that uses only the 1000 most common words in the English language. (A similar periodic table appears in Randall Munroe’s book Thing Explainer — Munroe being the cartoonist and physicist who popularized the common-words idea with his 2012 xkcd comic “Up Goer Five”.) As Lorch was working on his table, he explains, “A number of links between elements jumped out at me. I jotted some links down, then got to wondering if the chain could flow through the whole table. I thought about trying to make the whole thread myself, but team efforts are always more fun.”
Lorch kicked off the project with element 101, mendeleevium, in honour of Dmitri Mendeleev, who created the first periodic table on 1 March 1869 (17 February in the Julian calendar). Shortly thereafter, Twitter users @sciencenotscary and @Stare_At_Air added links to tellurium and gold. Over the next few days, more people joined, crafting links based on elements’ histories, names, uses, chemical or physical properties and, occasionally, personal anecdotes.
I made my first contribution on 8 February, linking helium and xenon with a “don’t try this at home” story I heard from a former colleague.
Inhaling helium makes your voice squeaky. What happens if you inhale xenon? Researchers at a prestigious US lab decided to find out. Turns out, "heavier than air"="too heavy for lungs to expel". The experimenter's life was saved when he stood on his head.
Xenon. #ElementTales
— Margaret Harris (@DrMLHarris) February 8, 2019
After that, my Twitter mentions exploded, with new links flying in thick and fast, alongside regular updates about which elements had been covered; complaints about the occasional “fork” in the chain; exhortations to find links to ultra-heavy elements wherever possible so as to avoid a boring finish; and even a selfie one participant took at the famous mine near Ytterby, Sweden, that produced ores used to isolate yttrium, ytterbium, erbium and terbium. Sadly, the elements I studied in my PhD thesis (rubidium and caesium) got “taken” by other participants, but I managed to link together a few of the other alkali metals, and also (thanks to a tip from Lorch) palladium and niobium.
The chain finally ended earlier today (with gadolinium, as it happens). However, you can find most of it if you search Twitter for the #ElementTales hashtag, and Lorch is working on a way of preserving all of the links – possibly in book form. Watch this space…
