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B1 Intermediate English 7:11 Educational

SCIENCE! What is the Rarest Precious Metal?

Vsauce · 12,508,442 views · Added 2 months ago

Learning Stats

B1

CEFR Level

5/10

Difficulty

Subtitles (88 segments)

00:01

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.

00:02

And I'm in Anaheim at VidCon. I hope to see some of you here, because I

00:06

like you guys. But I can't marry all of you.

00:11

But if I did put a ring on it, what is the most precious thing you could make that ring

00:17

out of? Silver, gold, platinum.

00:20

Those are all fine, but I wanna know what is the rarest, most scarce thing on Earth

00:26

that's stable and safe to wear I could make that ring out of.

00:29

And I want it to be pure. I'm talking elemental.

00:32

Well, luckily, I recently went to the University of Nottingham, home of Periodic Videos and

00:38

experimented with some elements. First things first, zinc dissolved in mercury.

00:44

This stuff is awesome, it's dense, it's heavy, it's liquid metal.

00:48

It's cool, but even cooler is human urine. Thank you Neil.

00:54

Of course I am just kidding. This is an aqueous solution of the metal vanadium.

01:00

And when we mix vanadium in with the mercury and the zinc, the mercury helps the zinc give

01:08

electrons to the vanadium. And is it gains more and more electrons, it

01:15

changes colour. We're looking for purple.

01:19

I love shaking this, it's crazy, it's like throwing me off balance.

01:23

It's so heavy. Look at that.

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