Named after beryllos, the Greek name for the mineral beryl, the element was originally known as glucinium — from Greek glykys, meaning "sweet" — to reflect its characteristic taste.
Beryllium is used to make cell phones, missiles and aircrafts. But workers who handle the metal need to watch out, as airborne beryllium has been known to be highly toxic.
Magnesium, an abundant mineral in the body, is naturally present in many foods, added to other food products, available as a dietary supplement, and present in some medicines (such as antacids and laxatives).
The first person to recognise that magnesium was an element was Joseph Black at Edinburgh in 1755. He distinguished magnesia (magnesium oxide, MgO) from lime (calcium oxide, CaO) although both were produced by heating similar kinds of carbonate rocks, magnesite and limestone respectively.
However, it was the French scientist, Antoine-Alexandre-Brutus Bussy who made a sizeable amount of the metal in 1831 by reacting magnesium chloride with potassium, and he then studied its properties
Strontium is a silvery metal found naturally as a non-radioactive element. About 99% of the strontium in the human body is concentrated in the bones.Several different forms of strontium are used as medicine. Scientists are testing strontium ranelate to see if it can be taken by mouth to treat thinning bones (osteoporosis).
Strontium was recognized as a new element in 1790 when Adair Crawford analyzed a mineral sample from a lead mine near Strontian, Scotland. Until then scientists had thought strontium and barium were the same element, and only barium’s existence had been recognized.
Strontium is used for producing glass (cathode ray tubes) for color televisions. It is also used in producing ferrite ceramic magnets and in refining zinc.
The world’s most accurate atomic clock, accurate to one second in 200 million years, has been developed using strontium atoms.
Barium is a metallic element chemically resembling calcium but more reactive. It is a soft, silvery metal and when cut it quickly turns a black color due to the formation of barium oxide, (BaO).It is also highly reactive with water or alcohol. When present in compounds barium exists usually in the Ba2+, divalent state.
In the early 1600s, Vincentius Casciorolus, a shoemaker with an interest in alchemy was excited. In the mountains near Bologna, Italy he had learned there was a heavy silvery-white mineral with remarkable properties – perhaps, he thought, it might even be the philosopher’s stone.
Barium compounds that are water or acid soluble are highly poisonous. Barium powder can ignite spontaneously in air.
Barium sulfate, used in x-ray imaging, is highly insoluble in water, and is therefore nontoxic and completely removed from the digestive tract.
Radium was discovered by Marie Curie, a Polish chemist, and Pierre Curie, a French chemist, in 1898. Marie Curie obtained radium from pitchblende, a material that contains uranium, after noticing that unrefined pitchblende was more radioactive than the uranium that was separated from it. She reasoned that pitchblende must contain at least one other radioactive element.
Curie needed to refine several tons of pitchblende in order to obtain tiny amounts of radium and polonium, another radioactive element discovered by Curie. Today, radium can be obtained as a byproduct of refining uranium and is usually sold as radium chloride (RaCl2) or radium bromide (RaBr2) and not as a pure material.
Radium's most stable isotope, radium-226, has a half-life of about 1600 years. It decays into radon-222 through alpha decay or into lead-212 by ejecting a carbon-14 nucleus.
The Curie, a unit used to describe the activity of a radioactive substance.
Radium had been used to make self-luminous paints for watches, aircraft instrument dials and other instrumentation, but has largely been replaced by cobalt-60, a less dangerous radioactive source. A mixture of radium and beryllium will emit neutrons and is used as a neutron source. Radium is used to produce radon, a radioactive gas used to treat some types of cancer. .