I'm glad you liked my articles.  That makes it worth the writing.  Heh.  I just got in from playing with my excess sodium.  Used a bit too big of a piece and had a nice loud explosion.  Thankfully I had enough pool acid left to neutralize it.    Francium is an alkali metal, but it is INCREDIBLY radioactive and has a very short half-life.  I do not believe that any visible quantities of it have ever been produced.  If it were to be produced, I'm guessing that it would be a liquid metal as cesium is just barely solid at room temperature.  Francium is a naturally occuring element, but again, its half-life is so small that ores don't exist.  Atoms just exist for brief moments during the decay process of other, heavier, elements.  

I'm still debating what my next article will be on.  I do have all the noble gasses in very nice discharge tubes, but there isn't too much I could write about them.  Phosphorus is really neat and has a nice history to it, but my black/violet phosphorus hasn't arrived yet.  We'll see what happens once I get the time to write another article.  

Do you guys have any links to other articles that are like Jdurg's stuff? Easy to read is definantly a plus, because I'm not terribly up to snuff on my terminology. I want to learn about EVERYTHING (as cheaply as possible).

Older articles can be found in the "Read Old Articles" link to your left. Although, no one else has started writing yet.

Thanks for all the kind words everybody.  I truly appreciate knowing that people are enjoying my writing and learning a few things.  It makes me even happier knowing that I'm not exactly the world's best writer.    I'm doing my best to come up with another article for this weekend and perhaps upload the GC/MS data from my forensic internship, but I have a lot going on right now in terms of personal life which is eating up my time.    As for what my next article is going to be.... well, there are a lot of elements to discuss and each one has so much to talk about.  I'm now thinking that a random number generator may be used to determine my next article.  

Good article on phosphorus! Now I'm trying think of some neat use for it. The only thing I really knew about white phosphorus was that it was used in war, and it was a terrible weapon.

Any progress on the mercury article?  

I haven't forgotten!!

Haha.  Actually, yeah.  I've put together an outline now to help give me ideas of what to include.  It's also letting me work on later parts of the article without having to finish the earlier parts.  I'm just doing a bunch of research to make sure that I can legally post some pictures that aren't mine and what steps I need to take to make sure proper credit is given.  So give it some time, and it will be done.  

Francium is so reactive. It is very hard to isolate it.