Cobalt
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free Cobalt trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cobalt is one of those elements most people have heard of without quite knowing why. It colors glass and paint, helps power the phone in your pocket, and has a history full of superstitious miners, secret messages and Cold War nightmares. This quiz turns the best fun facts about cobalt into 40 multiple-choice questions. They cover how the element got its name, who first isolated it, where it is mined today, why it matters to medicine and magnets, and how artists and potters have used its blue for thousands of years. It is pitched at curious adults, students revising the periodic table, and quiz hosts who want a science round with stories attached. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cobalt's name is traditionally traced to a German word for which mischievous creature of mining folklore?
Goblin
Goblin, or Kobold in German, was the miners' culprit for ore that looked rich yet gave up no silver and released poisonous fumes in the furnace.
Q 02Which essential nutrient, found in meat, eggs and dairy, is built around a single atom of cobalt?
Vitamin B12
Vitamin B12 is the only vitamin that contains a metal atom. Only bacteria and archaea can make it, so every animal depends on microbes for its supply.
Q 03Which central African country mines well over half of the world's cobalt, mostly in its Katanga copper region?
DR Congo
DR Congo dominates the metal so thoroughly that a 2018 investment report likened it to the Saudi Arabia of the electric vehicle age.
Q 04In the 1960s, cobalt salts added to which drink to steady its foam caused serious heart disease in heavy drinkers?
Beer
Beer drinker's cardiomyopathy was the name doctors gave the new illness after it struck heavy drinkers in Canada in 1966.
Q 05Which 1964 Stanley Kubrick satire features a Soviet doomsday machine built from cobalt-laced nuclear bombs?
Dr. Strangelove
Dr. Strangelove calls its doomsday material Cobalt-Thorium G, borrowing a real 1950 thought experiment about a bomb designed to spread deadly fallout.
Q 06A cobalt chloride solution is a classic recipe for which spy tool, turning blue only when heated?
Invisible ink
Invisible ink made with the salt dries almost colorless, shows up when warmed, and then fades again, so one message can vanish and return.
Q 07Which video game company colored its mascot Sonic the Hedgehog to match its own cobalt blue logo?
Sega
Sega picked the hedgehog's color to echo its logo, then modeled his shoes on Michael Jackson's boots.
Q 08Cobalt lends its name to a famous blue pigment, but what color is the pure metal itself?
Silvery gray
Silvery gray, with at most a faint bluish tinge, is the metal's true look. The vivid blue appears only once its compounds are fired into glass, glazes and paint.
Q 09Scientific analysis shows Vincent van Gogh brushed cobalt blue into the swirling sky of which 1889 painting?
The Starry Night
The Starry Night owes its glowing stars and moon to a rarer choice still: Van Gogh combined Indian yellow with zinc yellow.
Q 10Most cobalt mined today goes into the rechargeable phone and car batteries named for which lightweight metal?
Lithium
Lithium-ion cells in phones and laptops still rely on cobalt-rich cathodes, while many electric cars have moved to recipes that need far less of it.
Q 11Cobalt and iron are two of the three common metals that are strongly magnetic at room temperature; which is the third?
Nickel
Nickel completes the trio, though cobalt holds its magnetism at higher temperatures than either partner, staying magnetic up to about 1,115 °C.
Q 12Miners once feared cobalt ores because smelting them released deadly fumes of which notorious poison?
Arsenic
Arsenic is bound into the main cobalt ores, so roasting them sent a toxic oxide up the chimney and gave the rock its cursed reputation.
Q 13Dry cobalt chloride test paper is blue; which color does it turn when it touches moisture?
Pink
Pink is the color of the salt once it takes up moisture, and the switch reverses on drying, so the same strip can be used again and again.
Q 21Which Swedish chemist isolated cobalt around 1735, becoming the first named discoverer of any metal?
Georg Brandt
Georg Brandt proved the new metal with experiments rather than tradition, and he spent his later career exposing fraudulent alchemists.
Q 22Before cobalt was identified, the blue it gives glass was wrongly credited to which other metal found in the same ores?
Bismuth
Bismuth turns up in the same ores, so it took the credit until 18th-century experiments showed that only the newly isolated metal turned glass blue.
Q 23Radioactive cobalt-60 gives off which penetrating radiation, used to sterilize medical supplies and irradiate food?
Gamma rays
Q 14Cobalt oxide gives the trademark blue to the tin-glazed pottery of which Dutch city?
Delft
Delft potters turned to the style after 1620, when the death of China's Wanli Emperor interrupted the supply of imported porcelain to Europe.
Q 15Heat-resistant cobalt superalloys were prized after World War II for the turbine blades of which machines?
Jet engines
Jet engines made high-purity cobalt so sought after that the United States began prospecting for the metal at home once the war ended.
Q 16Cobalt belongs to which family of elements in the middle block of the periodic table, alongside iron and copper?
Transition metals
Transition metals often form brightly colored compounds, the trait behind cobalt's long career in glass, glazes and paint.
Q 17The cobalt in Earth's crust was originally forged in which violent cosmic events?
Supernovae
Supernovae also shine because of the element: the decay of freshly made radioactive cobalt keeps an exploded star glowing for months.
Q 18Uncombined cobalt metal is found on Earth's surface almost only inside which objects, alloyed with iron?
Meteorites
Meteorites keep the metal locked in iron alloys, shielded from oxygen and damp; everywhere else in the crust it exists only in chemical compounds.
Q 19Cobalt from desert oases colored deep blue glass more than 3,000 years ago in which ancient land?
Egypt
Egypt's glassmakers of the Eighteenth Dynasty drew their cobalt from alum deposits in the oases of the Western Desert.
Q 20Which Japanese electronics company first sold rechargeable batteries with a cobalt oxide cathode, in 1991?
Sony
Sony's cell became the template for the battery in nearly every phone and laptop since, built on a cathode identified at Oxford in 1980.
Gamma rays from cobalt-60 made at a single Canadian power station, Bruce, sterilize a large share of the world's single-use medical devices.
Q 24Chemistry students view flame tests through cobalt blue glass to filter out the yellow glare of which element?
Sodium
Sodium, even in traces, burns a strong yellow that swamps other colors; the glass blocks it so fainter violet and blue flames show through.
Q 25Cobalt-poor volcanic soils caused 'bush sickness' in cattle in which country in the early 20th century?
New Zealand
New Zealand's North Island plateau lacked the trace metal; farmers later beat such shortages with cobalt bullets, dense pellets that lodge in an animal's stomach.
Q 26The town of Cobalt in which Canadian province boomed after silver was found beside a new railway in 1903?
Ontario
Ontario's boomtown was the world's fourth-highest silver producer by 1910, and prospectors trained there went on to find gold at Kirkland Lake and Timmins.
Q 27The cobalt that made Chinese blue-and-white porcelain possible in the 14th century was imported from which land?
Persia
Persia's ore was known in China as Islamic blue, and it stayed the most expensive cobalt even after local deposits were opened in the 16th century.
Q 28In 1818 watercolorist John Varley recommended cobalt blue for skies as a substitute for which prized older pigment?
Ultramarine
Ultramarine had to be painstakingly extracted from the stone lapis lazuli, which made a factory-made blue a welcome alternative for painting skies.
Q 29Which metal is alloyed with cobalt in the tough, corrosion-proof implants used for artificial hips and knees?
Chromium
Chromium and cobalt together resist corrosion so well that a pair of hip implants fitted in England in 1948 were still in place 67 years later.
Q 30Cobalt-based catalysts help oil refineries strip which element from fuel, cutting the pollution that causes acid rain?
Sulfur
Sulfur is pulled out by a catalyst that pairs cobalt with molybdenum, the chemistry behind today's ultra-low-sulfur diesel.