40 Fun Facts About Scandium

Scandium, named after Scandinavia, was discovered in 1879 by a chemist working in which country?

Sweden's Uppsala University is where the new metal's oxide was first separated, and its finder named the element after Scandia, the Latin for Scandinavia.

Which Russian chemist left a gap for scandium in his periodic table years before its discovery?

Dmitri Mendeleev forecast the missing element's atomic weight and the formula of its oxide, and scandium fitted both when it turned up a decade later.

Scandium-aluminium alloys were used in which Soviet fighter jets, including the 21 and 29 models?

Mikoyan MiG fighters used alloys holding just 0.1% to 0.5% scandium, a pinch that is enough to strengthen the aluminium.

Laser crystals containing scandium were made for the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed after which film series?

Star Wars became the nickname of Ronald Reagan's 1983 missile-shield plan after Senator Ted Kennedy mocked it, and its laser research used garnet crystals grown with scandium.

Scandium ranks only 50th among the elements on Earth but is the 23rd most common element in which body?

The Sun ranks scandium 23rd among its elements, far above the metal's 50th place on Earth as a whole, though it climbs to 35th in the crust.

Scandium-aluminium alloy, prized for being light and strong, is used to make bats for which sport?

Baseball bats made with a dash of scandium are stronger than plain aluminium ones, and the same alloy goes into lacrosse sticks and tent poles.

A hypothetical hollow cage of scandium and carbon atoms is named after the ball used in which sport?

Volleyball inspired the name volleyballene, a predicted molecule of 20 scandium and 60 carbon atoms that could one day store hydrogen.

Which American gunmaker, famous for revolvers, has built ultralight handguns with scandium-alloy frames?

Smith & Wesson gave its 340PD revolver a scandium-alloy frame, so the gun weighs about 12 ounces unloaded yet is chambered for .357 Magnum.

Scandium is rarely mined for itself and is often recovered from the waste of which radioactive metal?

Uranium mill tailings, the sandy leftovers of ore processing, hold enough scandium to extract, which matters because the richest scandium minerals go largely unmined.

The one stable form of scandium found in nature is created in which cosmic events?

Supernovae forge scandium-45, the only kind that lasts, and a little more is chipped off heavier iron-group nuclei when cosmic rays strike them.

Scandium, element 21, is the first member of which large family in the middle of the periodic table?

Transition metals begin with scandium, yet it behaves unlike most of them, sticking almost entirely to a single +3 state where its neighbours show several.

Scandium is grouped with the 15 lanthanides and one other metal under which misleading collective name?

Rare-earth elements is a misnomer: the 17 metals are fairly plentiful in Earth's crust, just thinly spread and hard to separate from one another.

Which element sits directly below scandium in the periodic table and often turns up in the same ores?

Yttrium was discovered first, in the very ores that also hide scandium, which is much scarcer in them and probably eluded chemists for that reason.

Which strong, light metal, next after scandium in the periodic table, did scandium's discoverer help isolate?

Titanium, element 22, was first isolated in fairly pure form in 1887, eight years after the scandium find, by the same chemist and his colleague Sven Otto Pettersson.

Which metal, one place before scandium in the periodic table, is used to free scandium from its fluoride?

Calcium pulls the fluorine away at high temperature, leaving scandium metal; the fluoride itself is made from the oxide, the form in which scandium is sold.

Besides Madagascar, which European country is a noted source of the few minerals rich in scandium?

Norway's Iveland and Evje og Hornnes district has the scandium-rich mineral, yet nobody mines it there; supply comes instead as a by-product of other metals.

Which scarce, collectable mineral of granite pegmatites can hold up to 45% scandium oxide?

Thortveitite takes its name from the engineer Olaus Thortveit, and clear gem-quality crystals are so unusual that one found in 2004 earned a report in a gemmology journal.

What placeholder name did scandium carry while it was still only a predicted gap in the periodic table?

Eka-boron marked the gap one place below boron in the early table, and the atomic mass of 44 forecast for it proved almost exactly right.

The prefix 'eka' in the name first given to undiscovered scandium means 'one' in which ancient language?

Sanskrit supplied the prefixes eka, dvi and tri, meaning one, two and three, to show how many places below a known element each predicted one would sit.

Which discoverer of holmium and thulium realised that scandium matched an element predicted years earlier?

Per Teodor Cleve spotted the match and wrote to tell the predictor, since scandium's own discoverer was apparently unaware of the forecast.

Which chemist discovered scandium in 1879 by separating a new oxide from scarce Scandinavian minerals?

Lars Fredrik Nilson prepared just 2 grams of the pure oxide, and later swapped exotic metals for farm science, writing nearly sixty papers on soils and manures.

Scandium was first detected in which mineral, named from the Greek for 'hospitable to strangers'?

Euxenite earned its welcoming name by holding so many uncommon elements at once, and scandium was detected in it alongside a second mineral, gadolinite.

Which laboratory technique revealed scandium in 1879 by showing a pattern of lines no known element produced?

Spectral analysis of the newly separated oxide showed a pattern of lines never reported before, the evidence that it held an undiscovered metal.

Metallic scandium was first produced in 1937 by which process, applied to a molten mixture of chlorides?

Electrolysis of molten potassium, lithium and scandium chlorides at 700 to 800 °C finally yielded the metal, 58 years after the element was identified.

Scalmalloy, a scandium-aluminium alloy for printing metal parts, is sold by a spin-off of which planemaker?

Airbus spin-off Apworks has marketed Scalmalloy since 2013 as a powder that lasers fuse layer by layer into strong, light components.

In metal-halide lamps, scandium is used as a salt of which halogen, alongside the matching sodium salt?

Iodine compounds of the two metals give the lamp a white light whose colour rendering is good enough for filming with cameras.

Scandium trifluoride does what unusual thing when heated, over a range of more than 1,000 degrees?

It shrinks because its fluorine atoms swing sideways as they warm, tugging the scandium atoms on either side closer together.

Zirconia doped with scandium oxide serves as a high-efficiency electrolyte in which clean-energy devices?

Fuel cells of the solid-oxide type gain ionic conductivity and thermal stability from the scandium, and they can run on a variety of fuels.

Erbium lasers built on a scandium garnet crystal cut both hard and soft tissue in which branch of medicine?

Dentistry uses these Er,Cr:YSGG lasers to prepare cavities and in endodontics, the treatment of a tooth's inner pulp and root canals.

Bayan Obo, one of only three mines producing scandium in 2003, lies in which country's Inner Mongolia region?

China's Bayan Obo was discovered as an iron deposit in 1927, and scandium is recovered there only as a by-product, as at the other mines that yield it.

Light, strong scandium-aluminium alloy has been used in the frames of which road and mountain vehicles?

Bicycles built for high performance adopted the alloy, though newer frame materials such as carbon fibre later dented its popularity.

Radioactive scandium-46 serves as a tracer in which industry, tracking the movement of different fractions?

Oil refining uses scandium-46, the longest-lived of scandium's radioactive forms with a half-life of about 84 days, and it can also reveal leaks in underground pipes.

Adding scandium to aluminium limits grain growth in the heat zone created by which metal-joining process?

Welding heats the metal beside a seam, and scandium keeps the crystals there fine; atom for atom it is the most potent strengthener of aluminium.

Scandium is almost as light as aluminium but far outperforms it on which physical property?

Melting point is scandium's edge: the metal stays solid up to about 1,541 °C, far beyond aluminium, which is why engineers see such promise in it.

Scandium's abundance in Earth's crust is comparable to that of which metal, known for blue pigments?

Cobalt and scandium each make up roughly 20 grams of every tonne of crust, but scandium is spread so thinly that few minerals concentrate it.

Which element's atomic clocks, which define the second, might be outdone by a nuclear clock using scandium-45?

Caesium clocks could in theory be beaten a thousandfold by timing a 12.4 keV jump inside the scandium nucleus.

Scandium-44, with a half-life of about four hours, is of interest for which kind of medical imaging?

PET scan tracers must emit positrons, which is exactly how scandium-44 decays, and hospitals could make the isotope in small cyclotrons.

Scandium has a 'diagonal relationship' with which lighter metal, like the one between beryllium and aluminium?

Magnesium sits one step up and to the left of scandium, and such diagonal neighbours often behave alike even though they share neither a row nor a column.

Scandium, germanium and which other predicted element together convinced chemists that the periodic law was correct?

Gallium came first, in 1875, followed by scandium in 1879 and germanium in 1886, each filling a gap that had been forecast in the early periodic table.

Almost all compounds of scandium, including the triflate used by organic chemists, share which appearance?

Colourless is the rule for scandium salts; a notable exception is a blue-black chloride in which the metal takes an unusual +2 state.