General Knowledge quiz II

As You Will? I'm not even sure that's the title.
 
A Winter's Tale?
Yep! (Well, technically "The Winter's Tale", but whatever. :p) Poor Antigonus; he was beginning to turn around to not abandoning Perdita, and then he gets chased off and eaten. Oh well, it made for some lulz.

You're up.
 
The. The. I got it mixed up with 'A Christmas Carol' again. :cringe:

Anyway, after a day of trying I can't think up a good question, so, open floor.
 
I'll grab the floor.

What is the only mammal with a spur capable of delivering venom?
 
A platypus, perhaps?
 
I agree, Duckbilled Platypus males have a spur on their back legs I believe.


Next Question!:mad:
 
Open floor, although Marsden has the best claim since he mentioned males and such.
 
Very well, then. What two elements are named after demons or demonic characters because of the difficulty the scientist had seperating them?


Clues to follow if necessary.


1. They are both metals.

2. They are near iron on the periodic table.

3. They're both magnetic.

4. They can be considered transition metals.
 
Bohrium must be one of them!
 
So they're metals, not transition metals?
 
Are we giving up?


Their symbols are Ni and Co. If that doesn't give it away, then I have no use for you. :shake:
 
Nickel and cobalt.

What demons are they named after, btw?
 
Swedish chemist Georg Brandt (1694–1768) is credited with isolating cobalt circa 1735.[5] He was able to show that cobalt was the source of the blue color in glass, which previously had been attributed to the bismuth found with cobalt. The word cobalt is derived from the German kobalt, from kobold meaning "goblin", a term used for the ore of cobalt by miners. The first attempts at smelting the cobalt ores to produce cobalt metal failed, yielding cobalt(II) oxide instead. Also,because the primary ores of cobalt always contain arsenic, smelting the ore oxidized into the highly toxic and volatile oxide As4O6, which was inhaled by workers.

Nickel is a mischievous sprite in German mythology. It became the name of the metal through a contraction of the German name for niccolite - an ore of nickel - Kupfernickel. The Kupfer element of this word is German for copper and Kupfernickel is used in the sense of "false copper" because niccolite bears a resemblance to copper-ore. The German miners were looking for copper but could obtain none from the mischievous Kupfernickel.[9]

One of my favorite things that makes me smile is that the name for the bread "pumpernickel."

The Philologist Johann Christoph Adelung states about the Germanic origin of the word, in the vernacular, Pumpen was a New High German synonym for being flatulent, a word similar in meaning to the English "fart", and "Nickel" was a form of the name Nicholas, an appellation commonly associated with a goblin or devil (e.g., "Old Nick", a familiar name for Satan), or more generally for a malevolent spirit or demon. Cf. also the metal nickel, probably named for a demon that would "change" or contaminate valuable copper with this strange metal that was much harder to work. Hence, pumpernickel is described as the "devil's fart", a definition accepted by the Stopes International Language Database,[2] the publisher Random House,[3] and by some English language dictionaries, including the Merrian-Webster Dictionary.[4] The American Heritage Dictionary adds "so named from being hard to digest."
 
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