Crookesite Crookesite Crookesite is a selenide mineral composed of copper and selenium with variable thallium and silver. Its chemical formula is reported either as Cu(Tl,Ag)Se or (Cu,Tl,Ag)Se. It is formed by precipitation from hydrothermal fluids, and contains by mass: 16.3% Tl, 47.3% Cu, 2.9% Ag, and 33.6% Se. Crookesite is an opaque, bluish grey to pink toned brown metallic mineral crystallizing in the tetragonal system. It has a Mohs hardness of 2.5 to 3 and a specific gravity of 6.9. It was discovered in 1866 in Skrikerum, Sweden and named for Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), the discoverer of the element thallium.
Chemical element than the current estimated age of the universe, bismuth-209 has the longest known alpha decay half-life of any naturally occurring element. The very heaviest 24 elements (those beyond plutonium, element 94) undergo radioactive decay with short half-lives and cannot be produced as daughters of longer-lived elements, and thus they do not occur in nature at all. The properties of the chemical elements are often summarized using the periodic table, which powerfully and elegantly organizes the elements by increasing atomic number into rows ("periods") in which the columns ("groups") share recurring ("periodic") physical and chemical properties. The current standard table contains