Element of the Year 2012!!!

Nothing gets people quite so fired up as a pageant of the Elements!  Which is why I had to sift through literally several ballots as I fulfilled the important responsibility of determining 2012's Elements of the Year.

And we begin with the Second Runner-Up!

Why does Calcium deserve a spot in the top three?  Well, it's just something you feel in your bones.  Calcium may be just another silvery metal, but it forms compounds you can really sink into your teeth.  I'll stop now.


The First Runner-Up!

Osmium is the surprise hit of 2012.  Voters were attracted to its legendary density and its nasty smell.  Actually, Elemental Osmium doesn't have a smell, but word on the street is that osmium tetroxide is indeed pretty harsh on the old nostrils.  The density is for reals, in any event.


And now, it's:

The Element of the Year 2012!!!

It's not an atmospheric gas like previous winners Oxygen and Nitrogen, but the oddball metal Gallium makes us feel all soft and warm!  It must be love.  It's not quite as runny as Mercury -- more of a "slowsilver" -- but as an industrial or structural metal, its effectiveness is somewhat less than that of, say, milk chocolate.  The milk chocolate, we are told, melts in your mouth.  Gallium melts in your hand.

Also, France.  Here's one of many amusing elemental icons from a very nifty interactive periodic table published by the Royal Society of Chemistry:

My nominee for Best Visual Pun on the Name of a
Chemical Element, 2012.

2013 will be another big, big year for Elements!  We've got Scandium coming soon!  We'll have fakey Element Seaborgium rubbing shoulders with workhorses like Iron and Sulfur!  We'll have exotic-sounding minor-leagers like Technetium and Promethium in the same lineup with "the Father of Us All": Hydrogen.  Stay tuned, and thank you for making Infinite Art Tournament your preferred source of data about the fundamental building blocks of matter.