Lithium's good name has been put through the ringer of late what with the public being half scared to death their cell phones will torch them in their sleep or bring down an airliner in flames. But no one, absolutely no one, wants to go back to the old tech days of Ni-Cad or alkaline batteries either. And so, despite the black eye, lithium is here to stay for the foreseeable future and, thanks in large part to Elon Musk, we can now expect it to power an increasing number of cars on the road.

Bolivia has a near-limitless amount of lithium locked up in its famed salt flats but the country is so hopelessly backwards that most of those Lithodollars remain only a fantasy of desperately needed revenue. By the time they finally figure out how to get their lithium on the market it may be too late for them as safer and better alternatives are rapidly being developed.

In the meantime consider lithium's interesting characteristics. It is the lightest of all metals. So light in fact it will float in water. It'll float, sure, but it'll do so while it also does its favorite thing, which is.... catching on fire! You see, lithium just loves getting jiggy with oxygen and their two atoms' passionate embrace releases a very literal flame. Keeping the two away from each other is argon's job (argon doesn't date anyone on the whole of the periodic table) and so you get to see in this offering a lonely strand of lithium looking out from its glass-and-lucite cell to the outside world so full of the oxygen it craves.