yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Helium 101 | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

  • [Narrator] Most people know helium as the lighter than air gas that fills our party balloons. But more importantly, it's an irreplaceable element for science and industry. Helium was discovered in 1868 during a solar eclipse. Astronomers observed a yellow light in the sun's corona and couldn't explain it with any known elements at the time. Their observations turned out to be the first sightings of a new element, and given its discovery near the sun, this element was named after the Greek god of the sun, Helios.

Helium is the second lightest element, second only to hydrogen. It's located near the top of the periodic table, coming in at atomic number two. Meaning it has two protons in its core. It's usually found in gas form but turns into liquid below negative 452 degrees Fahrenheit. Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, created during the Big Bang and found in stars, planets, and even our own moon.

However, it's relatively rare on earth. On our planet, helium forms as a gaseous byproduct of ancient uranium that's decayed over billions of years and is trapped beneath the earth's surface. It's harvested from natural gas reserves and can't be artificially produced, making helium a non-renewable resource on our planet.

Helium has a variety of applications, largely due to its unique characteristics. It's a noble gas, so it's less likely to interact with other elements. When mixed with neon, helium can create low power lasers used to scan barcodes at checkout counters. When mixed with oxygen in a high-pressure environment, helium allows deep sea divers to breathe in the air from their oxygen tanks more easily.

And since helium has a low boiling point, it's useful in extremely cold temperatures. Because of this, it can cool some of the most powerful electromagnets on earth, including the large Hadron Collider. While helium can be applied in seemingly countless ways, its availability is finite. Because it's lightweight, when helium is released into the atmosphere, it floats into space and is lost to earth forever.

(Drumline playing) But by pursuing avenues of helium recycling, exploration, and storage, we may be able to protect and sustain this precious non-renewable resource.

More Articles

View All
Multi digit division strategies for decimals
In a previous video, we started thinking about strategies for dividing numbers where either the numbers or decimals or their quotients are going to be decimals. So now let’s continue that. We’re going to do slightly more involved examples. Let’s say we w…
What can I do to protect my devices?
Mark, I’m pretty convinced that I need to protect my devices from other folks. How should I think about that? How does one protect their device? Yeah. The first piece is really taking what the manufacturers and the companies behind them are giving you. S…
This Greek Cave is Teeming With History—and Bodies | National Geographic
Classical Greece didn’t just come out of nowhere. If you really want to understand where the Greece of Athens, the Greece of the Acropolis, came from, you need to look way back in the past. You need to look several thousand years back in the past at place…
Determining congruent triangles example
We have four triangles depicted here, and they’ve told us that the triangles are not drawn to scale. We are asked which two triangles must be congruent. So, pause this video and see if you can work this out on your own before we work through this together…
Worked example: forming a slope field | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
In drawing the slope field for the differential equation, the derivative of y with respect to x is equal to y minus 2x. I would place short line segments at select points on the xy-plane. At the point (-1, 1), I would draw a short segment of slope blank.…
A Little Redneck Ingenuity | Port Protection
Blade spring and all, it’s the time to get prepared for the upcoming winter. You just can’t run down to the hardware store and get what you need; you have to go out and work for it physically, and it takes a lot of time. Eighteen-year resident Tim Curley…