Biology Forums - Study Force

Discuss General information about your mineral, including: chemical formula, percent chemical composition, origin of the name and any known synonyms, or alternate names. Summarize all of this in a clear, well-written paragraph.
Physical properties of your mineral including: color, luster, streak, cleavage, fracture, hardness, density, magnetism and luminescence. These are not terms we have discussed in the text or notes, so be sure to look them up explain what they mean here when reporting your results. Don’t just report words and numbers that no one understands—explain what they mean by relating or comparing them to something else, for example. Summarize all of this in a clear, well-written paragraph.
Discuss why your mineral is valuable by explaining how your mineral is used in its mineral form. Try to compare and contrast its industrial uses (how it is used in the process of making other things) from how it is found everyday items. Summarize all of this in a clear, well-written paragraph. 300 words would help if not just give me a little bit of information thank you.

Hi. Firstly,  want to ask you: do you know which minerals you need to find information for? There are many minerals important for the body such as: Calcium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Sulfur, Sodium, Chlorine, Magnesium, Iron, Cobalt Copper, Zinc, Molybdenum, Iodine, Selenium, Manganese, Nickel, Chromium, Florine etc. Are these sufficient or not?
Anyways, I've made some progress about this question. About the chemical formula (or more precisely: chemical symbol) you just have to write the symbol of each of these elements. For example:
Calcium=Ca, Phosphorus=P, Potassium=K, Sulfur=S, Sodium=Na, Chlorine=Cl etc. I'm pretty sure that's quite easy and you can do it yourself.

About the percent chemical composition: I think you have to write the mass percent of each of these minerals. For this, I found this very useful pdf: http://justonly.com/chemistry/pdfs/elemental_composition_human.pdf where it mentions the mass of all the elements (minerals or not, though you will need only the minerals) in a 70kg human body. To find the percentage you can do:
(mass of the mineral/70kg)*100% (be careful with the units)
But, because this is kidda time consuming, you can use wikipedia (the numbers are the same with only small differences):  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body#Elemental_composition_list
(you use the: "percent of mass" column. Again, not all are important minerals. You must choose only the important minerals- I think that the minerals that I suggested will be enough.)
Some examples for the percentage of body mass: Calcium 1.4%, Phosphorus 1.1%, Potassium 0.25%, sulfur 0,25% ect.

Finding the origin of the name is also easy using internet.
The names of most (if not all) of these minerals are originated from greek and latin names.
For example, of you type: "Calcium name origin" in google, you will easily find that the name origin is the latin "calcis" which means "lime".
Another example: With a similar search for phosphorus, you can easily find that the origin is the Greek word "phos" (meaning "light") and "phoros" (meaning bearer/bringer) so, phosphorus in Greek means bringer of light.
Similarly: Potassium name origin is the english "potash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potash)", and about the K symbol: it originates from the latin name "kalium", which originates from the Arabic word "qali" meaning alkali.
Similarly, you can quite easily search for the origins of the rest of the minerals.

About the alternative names: Not all the minerals have alternative names.
Brimstone is synonym to Sulfur
Kalium is sometimes used instead of Potassium
Natrium is sometimes used instead of Sodium
Bertholite is an alternative for chlorine.
I'd suggest you to try to make a search for this too, and if you can't find much results I'll help too. Remember, not all of these minerals have alternative names, so don't search for hours an alternative that doesn't exist :P

That's it for now, I'll look for the second (and apparently harder) part of this exercise another day. Meanwhile, it would be helpful if you could reply, present me your progress (if you manage to do any), and ask anything that you don't understand.

I am doing Cobalt could you help me more?

Actually this helped me alot thank you & its due next week then ill write you on here and tell you the grade I made. I am going to start on this now though hopefully get it done and figure out the next part on my own.

Sorry for the late reply, but I don't have much access to internet lately (you know, vacation :P)

So, about cobalt, I found:

About the mass percentage: wikipedia says it's 0.0000021% (or simply 21*10-7%)
Using the information of the other source, we find: (we must firstly convert the 3mg into kg. It's 3mg= 3*10-6kg) so we have: 3*10-6/70=...=42*10-7%
I know that the numbers are a bit different, but that's because the numbers are very small so there isn't precise percentage. I assume that any number close to these will do.

For the name origin, I found this:
The word cobalt is derived from the German kobalt, from kobold meaning "goblin", a superstitious term used for the ore of cobalt by miners. (wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#History )
Another version, claims that kobalt means "evil spirit" and that was used because the ore is poisonous.

For alternative names, I only found Cobaltum, which is the latin name, and it seems it's somewhat used.

About the 2nd part of the exercise:
Color: silver gray
Luster: It's metallic, just like Na and K minerals
Streak is the color of the powder produced when it is dragged across an unweathered surface. Cobalt's streak is dark gray.
Cleavage is how the mineral breaks when subjected to stress. It seems that Cobalt's cleavage is cubic (forms a cube- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleavage_%28crystal%29#Types_of_cleavage for other types of cleavages)
Fracture is Conchoidal (like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracture_%28mineralogy%29#Conchoidal_fracture )
hardness: From 0 to 10 (Mohs scale), cobalt has 5.5 hardness. The Mohs scale of mineral hardness is based on the ability of one natural sample of matter to scratch another mineral. So, since cobalt is 5.5, it can scratch apatite, but it is scratched by Orthoclase Feldspar (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohs_scale_of_mineral_hardness#Minerals )
Density at room temperature is about 8.9g/cm-3
Magnetic properties: Cobalt is ferromagnetic (it has similar magnetic properties to iron)
Luminescence is emission of light by a substance not resulting from heat. I couldn't find anything for Cobalt.

If you want, ask questions while you write the exercise. I'm not sure I'll find time to reply though.