tillandsia and rafflesia and proustite

1. Ytterbium. This word can be confusing if you forget whether there is one or two "t's" and one or two "r's." It is an element, Yb (#70 on the Periodic Table of Elements), discovered in 1878 by the Swiss chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac. He found a new component in the earth known as erbia and named it ytterbia after the Swedish town Ytterby where he found the compound. It was not until the 20th century, however, that it was separated out from another element (lutetium), and then it wasn't until 1953 that its chemical properties were fully determined. I think I was attracted to learn about ytterbium for another reason, and that is because it has few if any practical uses. It has been used in a X-ray machine when electricity has failed; it has some uses in dentistry, but otherwise it is commercially unimportant. Yet, it is one of the 100+ basic building blocks of the universe. A short article on it is here.

2. Proustite. I thought for a fleeting moment that this was a person who couldn't put down Remembrance of Times Past, but I learned, alas, that it meant something else. Proustite is "native sulpharsenide of silver, occurring in crystals or granular masses of a cochineal-red color; also called ruby silver or light-red silver ore." There are pictures of it online, though a solitary picture of stone, without context, is less helpful for me in really identifying it than a picture of a bird, animal or insect. Apparently proustite is isostructural with pyrargyrite (a silver antimony), but I really have no ability to carry things much further than this at this stage.

3. Rafflesia. I will quote from the Collegiate. It is "any of a genus (Rafflesia of the family Rafflesiaceae) of Malaysian dicotyledonous plants that are parasitic in other plants..." Who is it named after? None other than Sir Stamford Raffles (d. 1826), the British colonial administrator of Malaysia. This web site gives a picture of the rafflesia and says that it is the world's biggest flower. I can't verify that, but if such a claim is true, it may make me $2,000 on Jeopardy! some day. The site further says that it was discovered in 1818 by Rafflesia and a companion Dr. Arnold (too bad he didn't get the credit; I don't think the word would have been that difficult to spell!), that rafflesia is a parasitic flower, and that it has no green leaves, stalk or roots. It has a diameter of up to 80 cm. and weighs up to 7 kgs. Wow.

4. Tillandsia. This is "any of a large genus (Tillandsia) of chiefly epiphytic plants of the pineapple family native to tropical and subtropical America." One of the things you discover when you begin doing research in rather obscure plants/animals/culture groups of the contemporary world is that there not only is a web page devoted to the phenomenon under consideration but someone, somewhere thinks that it is the most interesting thing in the world and is just bursting with energy and anticipation to tell you about it. The dictionary definition, for good reason, is "flat." That is, it simply gives an unadorned definition of the thing. But then, on web pages, the aficionados take over and can tell you why they love the thing. For example, one of the links to the tillandsia says: "Tillandsia's are without doubt one of the worlds most amazing group of plants." Why? Because they have developed an ability to take all their food and water through specially designed cells without needing any roots. Thus, tillandsia can grow and attach themselves to places where no other plant can survive, such as on electrical cables or power lines.

5. Yagi. This word takes us out of the world of rocks and exotic plants and puts us directly into 20th century technology. Hidetsugu Yagi (b. 1886) was a Japanese scholar and electrical engineer, who designed a highly directional aerial antenna in the late 1920s for receiving and transmitting UHF and VHF waves within a narrow frequency band. The aerial today is known as the Yagi-Uda antenna, and consists of three short rods mounted transversely on an insulating support and pointing towards a signal source. This article describes some of the science of the antenna. The three mounted rods are called the reflector, the driven element, and the director.

6. Zoisite. The mineral zoisite is a structurally complex mineral containing calcium, aluminum, silicon, hydrogen and oxygen. At one time I was quite familiar with classes, subclasses and groups of minerals, but now I am not. In any case, it was named after Sigismund Zois von Edelstein, a Slovene nobleman who died in 1819, and described in the Collegiate as an "orthorhombic mineral that consists of a basic silicate of calcium and aluminum and is related to epidote." If you find a picture online, which you can see here, you see it almost as a quartz-like crystalline mineral. There still is a Zois mansion in Llubljana, Slovenia, where the family lived, and you can find a picture of it here. Sigmund Zois, as he is known to scholarship, studied natural sciences in his home town and managed to amass a collection of around 5,000 items which is kept in Llubljana to this day. And, in an interesting fact, the main award for science and also a state scholarship for talented students in Slovenia is named after him. I think it was worthwhile to pause on him for just a moment...

7. Zoysia. Ah, here we have the results of Sigmund's brother at work. Karl was rather short-lived (1756-1799) but at the 200th anniversary of his death, the Slovenian Museum of Natural History had a memorial exhibit to him. It says that the two most famous plants he discovered were the "Zois' bellflower" and "Zois' violet." The former, known as the Campanula zoysii, is pictured here. But most dictionaries, and the Wikipedia article, describe the word zoysia as "any of a genus (Zoysia) of creeping perennial grasses of southeastern Asia and New Zealand having find wiry leaves and including some suitable for lawn grasses esp. in warm regions." The Wikipedia article lists eight species of the grass, emphasizing that a hybrid of two of them is a very popular lawn cover. But I am a bit confused, even though I am not going to resolve the confusion here. I thought Karl Zois' claim to fame was giving his name to a pair of flowers, though the name Zoysia as a species name points to various grasses. I am sure that a botanist could straighten me out immediately, and I think I may go and try to find one now.

1931