Question: how many elements have you expremented with

Melissa Ladyman answered on 21 Jun 2016:

I don’t tend to use many elements, the ones found on a periodic table, I tend to use molecules. Molecules are chemicals made up of different elements, like water is made up of two hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom. Most of the molecules I use are made out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and sometimes fluorine or carbon- it’s amazing how many different kinds of molecule you can make out of just those elements.

As for elements I use a lot of Nitrogen- we use it to ‘wash’ air out of reaction flasks to get rid of all the oxygen, and when we want to stop water vapour getting in our experiments. Water vapour and oxygen can react with lots of things and cause problems in experiments- like making some special chemicals spontaneously catch on fire!