Meet the Chemiballs: Some* of the Transition Metals!
More Chemiballs! This time we’re looking at the Transition Metals. The Transition Metals are that flat bit in the middle of the periodic table. It’s defined as being all the elements that have a “d” orbital as their valence shell, which I’m sure there’s a very immature joke to be made of. But I’m far too mature and adult to stoop so low.
* Look, I’m not gonna draw all of the transition metals. Have you seen a periodic table recently? Have you seen how many transition metals there are? Like, 34 or something. And 90% of them would just be varying shades of grey ball anyways. I’ll probably draw every element eventually, a bit like how Periodic Videos made a video for every element eventually. For now, I’m just trying to establish all the interesting characters.
Table of Contents:
The Transition Metals’ Most Fabulous: Chromiumball
When people hear Chromium they think of that shiny, silvery chrome. This is a travesty, because Chromium’s chemistry has some of the most beautiful and vibrant colors. The word Chrome is Greek for color, after all. Most of the compounds of chromium have all sorts of different colors, like yellow (lead chromate), orange (ammonium dichromate), red (chromium trioxide), green (chromium sesquioxide), purple (chromium chloride), black (chromium carbide), and many more. You can get pretty much any color you want using chromium compounds.
This is because Chromium is able to donate differing amounts of electrons to atoms it’s bonded with thanks to Chromium’s unique oxidation states. The energy levels of its electrons can also differ depending on its bonding partners. Energy levels that are far apart will absorb light with wide wavelengths leaving only short-wavelength light making it appear redder, and vice versa.
But because some jerkoffs decided to put metallic chrome on their cars back in the 30s, one of the few times it isn’t colorful, everyone associates it with that boring silver color.
The Transition Metals’ Most Useful: Ironball
Iron is an unusual element. It’s ferromagnetic. There’s also quite a lot of it, which is a large part of why it’s used so much by humans. That and the fact that it’s genuinely pretty useful for a lot of things. But one thing a lot of people might not realize is that it’s the last element that can be fused inside a star.
Stars fuse lighter elements together to make heavier elements. But for some reason I’m not getting into, iron isn’t great for fusing under those conditions. So the older a star is the more and more iron will accumulate inside it. This iron is dead weight. Stars rely on the energy produced by fusion to resist their own gravity. Once stars run out of fuel they can fuse they die, going supernova or becoming a black hole. All elements heavier than iron are either created during the supernova or by things stronger than stars, such as pulsars.
Now does this really mean it’s iron’s fault? Does it really make sense to blame a completely natural phenomenon on an element? An element that is just an abstract concept some hairless apes use to describe the properties of quark clumps with 26 protons?
Yes. Absolutely. Fuck Ironball, he’s gonna make Sunball explode in 10 billion years. What’s Sunball ever done to you, Ironball? Asshole.
The Transition Metals’ Most Rule Excepting: Copperball
Fun fact: the slang of calling police “coppers” or just “cops” came from when police wore badges made of copper. This was back when copper was cheap and pennies cost less than a cent to manufacture.
Copper is a weird element. I’m not going to explain it in any detail, I don’t want to have flashbacks to my freshman gen chem finals, but copper has an exception for seemingly every rule. For instance, copper is orange instead of grey or silver like almost every other metal. Also, its electron orbitals violate the pattern established by most other elements. Chromium also does this, but copper’s importance as a reactant means it will come up in chemistry class a lot more often. Copperball just thinks he’s above the law, unlike that chrominal scum.
Copper is also a coinage element. This is because copper is pretty unreactive so is a good material to make coins and jewelry out of. You may be thinking that copper is reactive, and yeah, it is. But relative to other metals it’s pretty unreactive. There used to be native copper deposits where you could find a bit of copper just laying around. These were all mined out during the stone age bringing about the copper age. But still. This also tells us that Copperball doesn’t like to associate with dirtbag chemiballs.
The Transition Metals’ Lightest Unstable: Technetiumball!
Technetium is the lightest element with no stable isotopes. It’s a bit unusual in this regard, since none of the elements near it in the periodic table are radioactive in the slightest. The white symbol indicates that an element has no naturally occurring isotopes, or at least that all of those isotopes no longer exist. Presumably, there used to be some technetium in the universe from natural sources. But it’s all decayed away.
Technetium is named after the Greek word “techne” which means “man-made” or something like that. This is because virtually all the Technetium that exists is made by humans using profane alchemy to transmute from molybdenum. That or by bombarding it with neutrons in a particle accelerator or reactor or something. I’ve tried doing this with my death ray, as that is technically a handheld particle accelerator, but I kept missing it since the henchman holding the target was shaking so much.
This makes it incredibly useful to doctors. They can inject a bit of technetium-labeled antibodies that stick to tumors in a patient. This makes all the tumors radioactive and visible to the doctor’s scanners. Because technetium decays so quickly the doctors don’t have to worry about you getting too much radiation poisoning from this. Not only do you already have cancer, there’s not much radiation can do to you at that point, but the technetium will soon decay into nonradioactive stuff.
The Most Noble of the Transition Metals: Goldball
We all know what gold is. It’s fat, yellow metal that is too pompous to form chemical bonds with peasant balls. Also, some monkeys decided it was worth killing over for no reason.
The Fifth or Sixth Densest Transition Metal: Tungstencube
Apparently, cryptobros and NFT enthusiasts have taken to buying cubes of tungsten for… whatever reason.
Tungsten is known as being very hard and dense. It’s, like, the fifth or sixth densest transition metal depending on how you round Gold’s density. That’s also not counting all the unstable period 7 metals which mostly are more dense. There’s also a lot of non-transition metals which are denser. But those are all radioactive or toxic or really expensive. Tungsten is also expensive admittedly, but less so. So there’s that, I guess.
The W comes from Tungsten’s other name, Wolfram. Now I kinda regret not drawing it as a wolf-ram furry hybrid.
The Most Liquidy Transition Metal: Mercurypuddle!
Mercurypuddle is known as being liquid at room temperature. This makes it really cool to look at and play with. This is unfortunate for people in the past because it’s also pretty toxic. Mercury also has the weirdest chemistry. It’s really a very unique element. Bit of a blob monster though.
As an explanation to the featured image you probably clicked on, mercury likes to form amalgams with other metals. It’s actually pretty cool. Despite my 36 doctorates and a Ph.D. in evil, I can’t explain this better than this guy.
Addendum
If you disagree with my selection of transition metals and would have wanted me to include another, then too bad. Did you forget THAT I’M EVIL? Always complaining, I’d like to see you maintain a blog while trying to take over the world. Though I guess I did leave out quite a few important ones. Alright, fine. You can have ONE more for next week. Vote in the comments. Unless you’re reading this more than a week after posting, then voting’s closed.
What is your favorite Transition Metal? Is it one of the ones I didn’t mention? I hope so.
I drew all these instead of stealing them off Pixabay like I normally do with post images. As I am a firm believer in freedom of info on the internet, I give anyone permission to do whatever they want with them. Copy, repost, modify, etc, I don’t care.
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