These are the same tanks used to fill helium balloons at events or party supply stores. Tanks not only hold a lot more helium than your everyday party balloon, but they also release the helium with much more force. The more pure helium you inhale, the longer your body is without crucial oxygen. Breathing in pure helium can cause death by asphyxiation in just minutes.
Inhaling helium from a pressurized tank can also cause a gas or air embolism , which is a bubble that becomes trapped in a blood vessel, blocking it. The blood vessels can rupture and hemorrhage. Have a seat, breathe normally, and wait it out. If you or someone else experiences any of the following after inhaling helium, call right away:. That said, you should definitely avoid giant balloons and pressurized tanks. A one-off breath of helium from a small balloon for a laugh is unlikely to be catastrophic, but it can cause dizziness and make you pass out.
Adrienne Santos-Longhurst is a freelance writer and author who has written extensively on all things health and lifestyle for more than a decade. These common misconceptions about sleep can harm your health by keeping you from getting quality zzzz.
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Jump to main content. Periodic Table. Glossary Allotropes Some elements exist in several different structural forms, called allotropes. Allotropes -. Glossary Group A vertical column in the periodic table. Fact box.
Glossary Image explanation Murray Robertson is the artist behind the images which make up Visual Elements. Appearance The description of the element in its natural form.
Biological role The role of the element in humans, animals and plants. Natural abundance Where the element is most commonly found in nature, and how it is sourced commercially. Uses and properties. Image explanation. Helium was detected in the sun by its spectral lines many years before it was found on Earth. A colourless, odourless gas that is totally unreactive. It is also used to keep satellite instruments cool and was used to cool the liquid oxygen and hydrogen that powered the Apollo space vehicles.
Because of its low density helium is often used to fill decorative balloons, weather balloons and airships. Hydrogen was once used to fill balloons but it is dangerously reactive. Because it is very unreactive, helium is used to provide an inert protective atmosphere for making fibre optics and semiconductors, and for arc welding.
Helium is also used to detect leaks, such as in car air-conditioning systems, and because it diffuses quickly it is used to inflate car airbags after impact. Helium-neon gas lasers are used to scan barcodes in supermarket checkouts. A new use for helium is a helium-ion microscope that gives better image resolution than a scanning electron microscope.
Biological role. Helium has no known biological role. It is non-toxic. Natural abundance. After hydrogen, helium is the second most abundant element in the universe.
It is present in all stars. It was, and is still being, formed from alpha-particle decay of radioactive elements in the Earth. Some of the helium formed escapes into the atmosphere, which contains about 5 parts per million by volume. This is a dynamic balance, with the low-density helium continually escaping to outer space.
It is uneconomical to extract helium from the air. Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History. In , Pierre J. Janssen travelled to India to measure the solar spectrum during a total eclipse and observed a new yellow line which indicated a new element.
Joseph Norman Lockyer recorded the same line by observing the sun through London smog and, assuming the new element to be a metal, he named it helium.
In , the Italian Luigi Palmieri found the same line the spectrum of gases emitted by Vesuvius, as did the American William Hillebrand in when he collected the gas given off by the mineral uraninite UO2 as it dissolves in acid. However, it was Per Teodor Cleve and Nils Abraham Langer at Uppsala, Sweden, in , who repeated that experiment and confirmed it was helium and measured its atomic weight.
Atomic data. Glossary Common oxidation states The oxidation state of an atom is a measure of the degree of oxidation of an atom. Oxidation states and isotopes. Glossary Data for this section been provided by the British Geological Survey.
Relative supply risk An integrated supply risk index from 1 very low risk to 10 very high risk. Recycling rate The percentage of a commodity which is recycled.
Substitutability The availability of suitable substitutes for a given commodity. Reserve distribution The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves. Political stability of top producer A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Political stability of top reserve holder A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators.
Supply risk. Relative supply risk 6. Young's modulus A measure of the stiffness of a substance. Shear modulus A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material. Bulk modulus A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance. Vapour pressure A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate. Pressure and temperature data — advanced.
Listen to Helium Podcast Transcript :. You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Hello, this week we're almost at the top of the periodic table because we're taking a look at the lighter than air gas helium. But for this chemist a helium filled bobbing balloon is actually a source of pain and not a source of pleasure.
Here's Peter Wothers. We are all familiar with the lighter-than-air gas helium, but whenever I see a balloon floating on a string, I feel a little sad. It's not because I'm a miserable old so-and-so - it's just because, unlike the happy child on the other end of the string, I am aware of the valuable resource that's about to be lost forever. Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, but here on earth, it's rather rare.
Most people guess that we extract helium from the air, but actually we dig it out of the ground. Helium can be found in certain parts of the world, notably in Texas, as a minor component in some sources of natural gas. The interesting thing is how this gas gets into the ground in the first place. Unlike virtually every other atom around us, each atom of helium has been individually formed after the formation of the earth.
The helium is formed during the natural radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium. These heavy elements were formed before the earth but they are not stable and very slowly, they decay. One mode of decay for uranium is to emit an alpha-particle. This alpha-particle is actually just the heart of a helium atom - its nucleus. Once it has grabbed a couple of electrons, a helium atom has been born. This decay process for uranium is incredibly slow; the time it takes a given quantity of uranium to halve, its so-called half-life, is comparable to the age of the earth.
This means that helium has been continuously generated ever since the earth was formed. Helium was the first gas used for filling balloons and dirigibles. This application goes on in altitude research and for meteorological balloons. The main use of helium is as an inert protection gas in autogenous welding. Its biggest potential is found in applications at very low temperatures. The main application of ultralow temperature is in the development of the superconductivity state, in which the resistance to the electricity flux is almost zero.
Other applications are its use as pressurizing gas in liquid propellants for rockets, in helium- oxygen mixtures for divers, as working fluid in nuclear reactors cooled down by gas and as gas carrier in chemical analysis by gas chromatography. Helium is the second most abundant element in the known universe, after hydrogen.
Helium is formed in The Earth by natural radioactive decay of heavier elements. Most of this helium migrates to the surface and enters the atmosphere. It could be logical to think that the helium concentration in the atmosphere was higher than it is 5,25 parts per million at sea level. Nevertheless, its low molecular weight allows it to escape to space at the same rate of its formation. There is an about km layer in the heterosphere at miles where helium is the dominant gas although the total pressure is very low.
Natural gases contain higher helium concentrations than the atmosphere.
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