The 2010 Element of the Year!!!

Well, 2010 was certainly an exciting year for elements, am I right!?!  But now, with the votes all cast and counted and my hopes of rigging the contest in favor of Praseodymium dashed, we are ready to celebrate the first ever L&TM5K Element of the Year!!!

But first, a shout out to the Second Runner-Up!

The Gentle Readers can't get enough of Yttrium, the shy but plucky silver metal that's forever showing up in cabbage, synthetic garnets, phosphorescent screens, and the surface of the moon!  Its hobbies include improving high-temperature alloy performance and, possibly, infusing us all with "Divine-Source energy/pure white light!"


The First Runner-Up!

Xenon

Runner-up honors go to Xenon, one of those many colorless gases that are found in trace amounts in the Earth's atmosphere!  Although, when you think about it, all of the gases in the atmosphere pretty much have to be colorless, or the whole "vision thing," to coin a phrase, wouldn't work.  Maybe to somebody from a planet without Xenon, it's a ravishing shade of bright FnIIklk!  But not to us.  Xenon is into creating bright light when activated by an electric current, and being way too expensive to be used as an effective anesthetic!


Element of the Year 2010!!!

Oxygen

Anyone who has ever been in love has mostly been in love with Oxygen, the magical element that makes up 2/3 of all us human beings!  Not only could we not live without the stuff, we couldn't be without the stuff.  No wonder the overwhelmingly human readership of the L&TM5K has voted Oxygen

Element of the Year 2010!!!

I'm pleased to announce that Oxygen will soon be appearing at a location near you!  The third most common Element in the Universe, the second most common on Planet Earth, and easily the dominant Element here on the planet surface where the L&TM5K is published, it's charming, delicious (when you haven't had any in a while), and highly reactive.  Does familiarity breed contempt?  Not with Oxygen!  It's as common as can be... and it's the Element of the Year!