Trivia fans will stump all but the most die-hard of geeks with the question "What element on the periodic table named after a country's capital?" Never mind that a few years ago a couple of atoms of moscovium were made in a lab, the honor to such a question has for the longest time gone to holmium which would have been less trivial if it had been named stockholmium but we're getting sidetracked....

This rare earth metal is remarkably free of properties that could be exploited by industrialists but it finds its way into myriad small uses anyway. Metals do not all have to have ideal characteristics in order to be useful after all and holmium, like the rest of the lanthanides, is extremely difficult to isolate so that once it has been refined there are still markets willing to put the little-known metal to suitable tasks.

10mm cube weight is 8.9±0.1g.