• Question: what's your favourite element of the periodic table?

    Asked by E_kelleher to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Ruthenium! It’s such a pretty colour (ok, it looks orange), but its optical activity makes it really interesting to study. Plus you can add other things around it to attach it to things like DNA – it is Ruthenium that I used when looking at electron transfer in DNA.

    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      That would be Ruthenium. All of my reactions require compounds that are excited by light, so they need to be coloured. Ruthenium compounds tend to give me a whole range and selection of colours, and therefore I can use these for my research.

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      All of my reactions use Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen which are awesome, but not my favourites. I love Einsteinium but mainly because it’s fun to say! And I also like Lanthanum, Uranium and Radium because they spell my name (LaURa) 🙂

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