40 Fun Facts About Strontium

Strontium salts give fireworks which brilliant color, the same one that identifies the element in a flame test?

Red fireworks get their color from strontium salts, and the same crimson flame told chemists in the 1790s that they had found a new element.

Strontium is named after Strontian, a mining village where its ore was discovered in 1790, in which country?

Scotland can claim the only element named after a place in the United Kingdom. Strontian lies on the north shore of Loch Sunart.

Cold War scientists in St. Louis collected over 320,000 of which childhood castoffs to measure strontium-90 fallout?

Baby teeth mailed in by schoolchildren, who got a button in return, showed strontium-90 levels climbing through the 1950s, evidence that helped end above-ground testing.

Strontium aluminate, a pigment developed in Japan in the 1990s to replace zinc sulfide, is prized for doing what?

Glowing in the dark is what it does about ten times brighter and ten times longer than the pigment it replaced, which is why watch brands licensed it in the 1990s.

Strontium 90, a short-lived 1977 band, featured all three members of the classic line-up of which British rock group?

The Police took on guitarist Andy Summers soon after he played with Sting and Stewart Copeland in the project, put together by former Gong bassist Mike Howlett.

Radioactive strontium is dangerous because the body mistakes it for which nutrient and builds it into growing bones?

Calcium sits just above strontium in the periodic table and behaves so similarly that most of the strontium a person absorbs ends up in the skeleton.

Strontium-90 from 1950s bomb tests reached children through which everyday food, after fallout settled on pastures?

Milk carried it because dairy cows grazed on contaminated plants, which is why US officials began testing supplies around the country in the 1950s.

Strontium titanate, sold to jewelers from the 1950s under the name Fabulite, was a popular imitation of which gemstone?

Diamond has almost the same refractive index, but the imitation splits light into over four times as much rainbow fire, far more than the real thing shows.

The Soviet Union used the decay heat of strontium-90 to power about a thousand of which unmanned Arctic structures?

Lighthouses on the remote northern coast ran for years without refueling, but they went untended after 1991 and the last generators were only removed by 2021.

Strontium chloride has been the active ingredient in which bathroom product made for people sensitive to hot and cold?

Toothpaste made with it works by plugging the tiny open channels in dentine that carry sensations to the nerve, though most brands have since switched ingredients.

Which two-letter symbol stands for strontium in the periodic table, where it is element number 38?

Sr marks element 38, whose most common natural form, strontium-88, makes up about 83 percent of the element and is not radioactive at all.

Strontium belongs to which family of the periodic table, a group of six that also includes magnesium and radium?

Alkaline earth metals fill group 2, and each has two outer electrons that it gives up readily, which makes every member of the family reactive.

Which British chemist, also remembered for a miners' safety lamp, first isolated strontium metal in 1808?

Humphry Davy freed it with electricity, the method he used to isolate potassium, sodium and magnesium for the first time within the same two years.

Which heavier element sits directly below strontium in the periodic table and is slightly softer than it?

Barium is the next step down the group, and physician Adair Crawford was preparing its compounds in 1790 when he noticed that an ore from Strontian behaved differently.

Strontium's first ore turned up in 1790 in mines near Strontian that had been dug to extract which heavy metal?

Lead from the Strontian mines was later cast into bullets for the Napoleonic Wars, and captured soldiers from Napoleon's army joined the workforce there.

Strontian, the village that gave strontium its name, has a native name meaning the point of a hill of which beings?

Fairies give the village its name: Sròn an t-Sìthein means the nose, or point, of a knoll said to be home to the mythical sídhe.

Which pale blue crystal, often found lining the hollows of geodes, is the main ore mined for strontium?

Celestine is strontium sulfate, and miners favor it over the rarer carbonate ore because it far more often forms deposits large enough to work.

The world's largest known geode, a cave of strontium sulfate crystals found beneath a winery, lies in which US state?

Ohio's Crystal Cave was found in 1897 by a winemaker digging a well on a Lake Erie island, and tourists paying to see it kept his winery alive through Prohibition.

Strontium's first large-scale use, in 19th-century Germany, was helping factories produce which kitchen staple?

Sugar was pulled from beet molasses using strontium hydroxide, and German refiners needed so much of it that mining the ore became a local industry.

For decades most strontium went into the glass of color television tubes, where it blocked which kind of radiation?

X-rays from the tubes were soaked up by the front glass, and at the peak of the tube era this one job used about three-quarters of American strontium.

Which US president signed a 1963 ban on above-ground nuclear tests after seeing data on strontium-90 in children?

John F. Kennedy signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Britain and the Soviet Union once a survey showed levels in the young had almost tripled since testing began.

Strontium-90 is absent from natural ores and arises as a common by-product of which process inside reactors and bombs?

Nuclear fission of uranium-235 yields strontium-90 in nearly six of every hundred splits, which makes it a major part of the radioactivity in spent fuel.

Strontium-90 decays into an isotope of which neighboring element, named like three others after a village in Sweden?

Yttrium-90 lasts only a few days and is put to work in medicine, attached to drugs that carry its radiation straight to cancer cells.

Which cheerfully named secret US study of the 1950s measured strontium-90 in human bones gathered from around the world?

Project Sunshine stayed secret until 1956 and later caused outrage when it emerged that many remains, often of young children, had been taken without the families' consent.

Three men in which ex-Soviet republic were badly burned in 2001 after camping beside abandoned strontium-90 generators?

Georgia's Lia accident began when the men found two canisters that had melted the snow around them and used them as heaters through a winter night.

Geologists date ancient rocks and Moon samples by measuring strontium-87 left by the slow decay of which element?

Rubidium-87 decays so slowly, with a half-life of about 49 billion years, that the same method also works on meteorites.

Strontium locked in ancient bones revealed that some people buried at which English monument had come from Wales?

Stonehenge drew its bluestones from Wales too, and a 2018 study found that many of those buried around the time it was built had probably lived near the quarries.

Scientists reconstruct past ocean temperatures from the strontium laid down in the skeletons of which sea animals?

Corals take up less strontium when the water is warmer, and their skeletons can give a temperature record fine enough to read month by month.

Strontium metal reacts on contact with water, forming strontium hydroxide and giving off bubbles of which gas?

Hydrogen bubbles off as the metal breaks water apart, a reaction brisker than that of the element above it in the group and milder than that of the one below.

Pure strontium metal reacts so readily with air that laboratories usually keep it submerged in which liquid?

Mineral oil or kerosene keeps oxygen away from the metal, which otherwise begins to tarnish within moments of being cut.

Freshly cut strontium shines silver, but within moments in air its surface takes on which tint?

Yellow spreads across the metal as its oxide forms, and powdered strontium reacts so eagerly with air that it can ignite on its own at room temperature.

In the British comic strip Strontium Dog, strontium-90 fallout has filled the future with which persecuted characters?

Mutants are the strip's heroes: Johnny Alpha, born with blank white eyes and strange powers, takes a new name to escape discrimination and becomes a bounty hunter.

Strontium carbonate is fired with iron oxide to make cheap ceramic versions of which parts of loudspeakers and motors?

Magnets made this way are called hard ferrites, and they are cheap enough to be the usual kind stuck on refrigerator doors.

Astronomers spotted freshly forged strontium in the light from a 2017 collision between two of which stellar objects?

Neutron stars smashing together had long been suspected of forging heavy elements, and strontium in the debris was the first such element identified there.

Hospital generators loaded with strontium-82 supply a tracer lasting barely a minute for PET scans of which organ?

Heart scans use it because strontium-82 steadily decays into a tracer with a half-life of about 75 seconds, far too brief to ship, so it is made on the spot.

The drug strontium ranelate was developed to cut the risk of fractures in people with which condition?

Osteoporosis patients gained bone density on it, but regulators restricted the drug after trials pointed to a raised risk of heart attacks and blood clots.

Strontium atoms trapped in a web of laser light are the working core of an ultra-precise type of which instrument?

Atomic clocks built on strontium already outperform the cesium standard that defines the second, so the element is a candidate to redefine it.

Besides fireworks, strontium nitrate supplies both color and oxygen for which emergency signal kept in many vehicles?

Road flares burn it because the compound does two jobs at once, releasing oxygen to feed the flame while its strontium tints the light.

Because strontium-90 lodges in bone beside the marrow, it is linked to bone cancer and which other cancer?

Leukemia is a risk because the isotope's radiation reaches the marrow where blood cells are made, and the body can take years to clear it.

Strontium-90 contaminated about 30,000 square kilometers after an explosion at which nuclear power plant?

Chernobyl's reactor released only about 5 percent of the strontium-90 in its core, yet the isotope ranked among the most harmful to health after the accident.