Europe's 'New' Periodic Table Predicts Which Elements Will Disappear in the Next 100 Years.

Pedro_P

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

A new periodic table sizes the boxes for each element based on their relative abundance. Oxygen is plentiful, but indium and helium may soon be scarce, thanks to humans' voracious appetite for smartphones and party balloons.
Credit: EuChemS/CC BY-ND
▼ Oxygen can breathe easy, but the party might soon be over for helium balloons.
Those are two takeaways from a brand-new model of the periodic table of elements, debuted this week by the European Chemical Society (or EuChemS, a group representing more than 160,000 chemists in the European Union). Unlike the ubiquitous classroom version of the table, which categorizes the universe's 118 known natural and synthetic  elementswith equal space for each element, EuChemS' chart has been warped and wobbled to show the relative abundance or scarcity of 90 naturally occurring elements here on Earth.
The bubbly new chart of life's building blocks is more than a cool curiosity; according to EuChemS president David Cole-Hamilton, it's also an important reminder of which of Earth's elements are in danger of disappearing, thanks to human overuse.
"Some of these elements, we have less than a hundred years before it's much more difficult to get hold of them," Cole-Hamilton told the Marketplace "Morning Report" radio show. Others, he noted, may only have a shelf life of a few decades.
According to the new table, oxygen— which makes up about 21 percent of Earth's atmosphere and is (knock on wood) allowing you to breathe right now — is the planet's most abundant element and faces no threat of extinction.
Many of the most-threatened elements, meanwhile, are being used to manufacture tech-heavy devices like computers and smartphones. Indium, for example,  (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, continue reading this article here: Source