Why Are Olympic Medals Gold, Silver, and Bronze

Check out these divers, trying super-hard to dive the best dive that has ever been dived:

These faces don't lie. Image via.

Incredible feats of strength, dedication, and squished faces are on prominent display at the London 2012 Olympics. I won't pretend to understand what drives Olympic athletes to be so zany, but I do know that if they squish their faces hard enough they will be rewarded with one of these beautiful Olympic medals.

2012 Olympic Medals

There they are...silver, gold, and bronze...from left to right. But why are those medals made out of those metals????? AND, why is bronze good, silver better, and gold the best??

Yoe the Scientist's Nano-Sized Brain

Deep in the heart of south-central Wisconsin, there lives a scientist who would prefer to remain nameless and (nearly) faceless.  We will call him Yoe.

Yoe the Scientist

Why Pee is Cool - entry #6 - "Pee, Our Connection with the Earth's Metabolic Cycle"

Here, in the final PeePeePost, is where we bring all we have learned together and find out how the act of peeing unites us with our planet.

sciseekclaimtoken-4eab48c19bc77 Any form of life that we know of needs two basic things.  The first is matter, as life has to be made of something.  The second is energy, so life can do something with that matter (e.g., move around, reproduce, watch trailer park boys).  Most life on earth gets its energy from the sun.  All life on earth gets its matter from...from earth, duh!

As we learned in the last PeePost, the atoms in your body are no different from the atoms in rocks/oceans/air/etc.  Additionally, the composition of our bodies is close-ish to that of the earth's crust!!

Graph of abundances of chemical elements in the earths' upper continental crust.  We are made mostly of the really abundant stuff in the upper left (e.g., oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc.)

Because of those two facts, I like to think of any kind of earth life as little tiny earth particles--walking, talking, peeing, sometimes neighborly little chunks of the earth's crust.

Humans are earth particles.

Why Pee is Cool - entry #4 - "PeePee Portal to Phosphorus" or "What the Alchemists Did Right"

Travel with me back in time, when humans were first beginning to wonder things like "What the hell is the world around me made of anyhow!?"  Picture yourself as an ancient alchemist, repeatedly trying in vain to figure out a way to turn anything into gold.  You pretty much suck at doing science, but as a result of all your fool-hearty work you do know how to do things like mix, heat, and distill stuff.  The first problem you face as an alchemist is that you need some substance to do experiments on.

Pee