Meet the Chemiballs: Exposition and Cute Drawings of the Nonmetals

Today I’m posting my versions of all the Elementball nonmetals (excluding the metalloids, halogens, and noble gases, which will get their own posts). It may seem weird to define a group of things by what they’re not. However, of the 118 known elements, 99 are metals or metalloids. So it’s really not.

I love balls. Especially Countryball comics, also known as Polandball comics. If you don’t know what countryballs are, it’s a very popular meme format where countries are embodied in a very particular art style. It’s a great medium for making jokes/criticism about politics and history. I mean, just look at r/countryball. These little blobs are so cute.

Lots of other ball communities have spawned from Countryballs with the same format but different subject matter, such as Ideologyballs, Planetballs, and LGBallT. One of the little-known ones is Chemiballs. At first, I thought I was the first one to have the idea as I doodled them in my notebook during chemistry class. It seems like the kind of thing that would already exist so I searched the internet for every combination of ball and chemistry term I could think of. Chemball, chemicalball, chemistryball, etc. I found a deleted Elementball Wikia. Therefore, I have seized Elementballs into my growing domain.

Edit: A while after making this and a few other posts a Redditor told me that r/chemiball exists, with an i. I never would have thought to search for that. Oh well.

• Hydrogenball and its Isotopes
• Carbonball
• Nitrogenball
• Oxygen
• Phosphorusball
• Sulfurball
• Seleniumball
• Addendum

Hydrogenball: the Smolest of the Nonmetals

Hydrogen is one smol boi. The triplets may look big when they’re the subject of a picture. But he is minuscule compared to every other Elementball except for Heliumballoon, whose just one orbital larger and a couple AMUs heavier. Positively charged hydrogen ions that have lost their electron are usually just called protons, as that’s all they are.

Normally, adding or removing a few neutrons (creating an isotope) doesn’t change the properties of an element very much. But the difference between Hydrogen-1 and Hydrogen-2 literally doubles its weight. Also, Hydrogen-2 nuclei move slower than normal protons, so chemistry involving heavier hydrogen isotopes is slower. These changes are so important that it’s worth giving hydrogen isotopes their own unique names and symbols.

Deuteriumball

Deuterium has one more neutron than normal hydrogen. It’s relatively rare in the universe because it’s always the first thing stars will fuse into heavier elements. Deuterium is so easy to fuse that it’s the subject of a lot of research regarding fusion power. Also, Deuterium has a spin of 1 while Hydrogen-1 has a spin of 1/2. If you don’t understand enough physics to know what that means, I can’t help you because neither do I.

Tritiumball

Tritium has two neutrons and one proton. This is more neutrons than Hydrogen is happy with apparently. So eventually it will transmute into a helium-3 atom when one of the neutrons decomposes into a proton and an electron. Unfortunately for people who have been exposed to glowing tritium paint, that’s what radioactive decay is. While tritium paint isn’t super radioactive you still should avoid inhaling or ingesting it.

Tritium doesn’t emit any color of light in the visible spectrum. Glowing tritium plaint only does that because it’s mixed with phosphor that glows when hit with radiation. Phosphor comes in many colors, I’ve only chosen green because why not?

Carbonball: the Most Useful of the Nonmetals

Carbonball is arguably the most useful elementball. It’s the only element that can make four stable bonds with both positive and negatively charged atoms. Siliconball can do that too, but most of those bonds are pretty weak. Also, Siliconball is a lot fatter (higher atomic mass). Most elements don’t form great bonds with themselves (except for all the exceptions). Not only can Carbon form strong bonds with itself, but it’s also actually one of the best things it can be bonded to. Materials made from exclusively carbon, such as diamonds and graphene, are the strongest materials we have.

Carbonball doesn’t take BS from anyone. Carbonball really likes having exactly four bonds because it likes having exactly 8 electrons in its valence shell. For a long time, chemists didn’t even think it was possible to ionize carbon through chemical means. It turns out that it is possible to ionize carbon, it’s just difficult and usually doesn’t last very long.

An alkane anion (a hydrocarbon where one of the C-H bonds is replaced with a lone pair of electrons) is the strongest base and will rip a proton off of virtually anything to neutralize that charge.

The word “organic” literally just means that it contains carbon. So yeah, I sure hope that salad is organic and not silicon-based or something.

Nitrogenball: the Nicest of the Nonmetals

Nitrogenball is like a nice guy, right? Nitrogen is pretty useful and helps out a lot in a lot of molecules. It’s pretty good at holding a charge and delocalizing electrons. It’s not quite as reactive as oxygen, and its diatomic form N2 is an inert gas. This is good as it makes up 70% of the atmosphere. Also, liquid nitrogen is really cool in both meanings of the word.

But we sometimes underestimate nitrogen. It is still the third most electronegative element right after oxygen and fluorine. N2 is only an inert gas because that Nitrogen=Nitrogen triple bond is just so strong, not because nitrogen itself is inert. Nitrogen is one of the most reactive elements in the universe. It’s just too tangled up in lots of bonds to actually be very reactive most of the time. Like any nice guy you can only push Nitrogenball so far until he snaps. *Cue joker memes*. A lot of explosive molecules, such as Azides and Nitros, get their explosivity from nitrogen.

Oxygenball: the Second Most Electronegative of the Nonmetals

When people think of oxygen, they’re usually thinking about how they need it constantly to survive. So the average person probably has a pretty positive opinion about oxygen. But they don’t realize that under the surface Oxygenball is actually a horrible, evil element. This is the same relationship I have with RedBull. And like me, you need to be educated on that fact even if you refuse to believe it.

Oxygen is an extremely reactive element. It’s the second most electronegative, right after Fluorine. Electronegativity is basically how much an element wants to form a bond so it can get more electrons. Oxygenball just really really wants to have more Electronballs. She just, frickin’, wants them. A lot.

Oxygen is also a diatomic element. Which means that any single atom will immediately bond to another oxygen atom rather than be alone. (This is also true for hydrogen, nitrogen, and all halogens). However, unlike N₂, O₂ has a very unhealthy relationship. O₂ will break apart the moment they encounter anything that is a better partner than each other. This is what causes metal to rust and fruit to turn brown. This is known as oxidation. Oxygen is not the only thing that can oxidize stuff. But the fact that an entire type of reaction is named after it shows just how reactive oxygen is.

There was a colossal mass extinction after cyanobacteria first evolved a method of photosynthesis that produces O₂ as a byproduct. Though we need it to survive, it doesn’t even do much in our bodies. It’s mostly there to bond with waste hydrogen ions produced by the mitochondria so they don’t burst. But this isn’t without cost. Oxygen is also, according to some, what causes us to age.

Oxygen is usually associated with the color red in molecular diagrams and such. Which is odd, because liquid oxygen is blue.

Phosphorusball, Sulfurball, and Seleniumball: the other ones

I kinda cut a few corners while drawing Phosphorusball and Sulfurball. It’s not laziness, think of it as achieving a goal with the conservative expenditure of resources. Yeah, let’s go with that. This is the same reason I won’t be discussing Seleniumball at all. Honestly, did anyone come here hoping to hear about selenium? If you did, please explain why in the comments. I’m genuinely curious.

Phosphorus and Sulfur are in the third period, which means they’re in the third row of the periodic table. Their nuclei have a weaker connection to their valence electrons than do period 2 elements like oxygen and carbon. This is because they are fatties (have so many electron orbitals). This means that a gang of strongly electronegative ruffians can come along and steal all of their valence Electronballs. This is why sulfur in molecules like Sulfuric Acid can have 6 bonds despite it only having a charge of -2.

O
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HO–S–O^–
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Sulfur being gangbanged by four oxygens, AKA Sulfuric Acid

Normally I would tighten the line spacing on a lewis structure like this. But WordPress has zero capability to do that without installing a plugin that would slow down the site. I spent, like, an hour trying to find a way around this messing with HTML and CSS but that never worked. Now I’m slightly madder than usual.

Addendum

Which of the nonmetals is your favorite? Vote in the comments. If there is a winner by next week I will make an extra comic of that one. (even if it’s Selenium!)

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.