Part 1 of 5 · freeIntroduction
Cobalt is element 27 of the periodic table, wedged between iron and nickel. It is in the battery of the phone in your hand, in magnets, in alloys hard enough to survive inside a jet engine. And almost nobody digs for it.
About 99% of the world's cobalt comes out of the ground as a by-product: it is scraped from ore that was worth mining for its copper or its nickel. The Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies roughly three-quarters of it, nearly all from copper mines. So the supply of cobalt does not depend on how much cobalt the world wants, but on how much copper and nickel it wants. A strange way to run the metal electric cars are built on.
The rest is in the Sophia app.The remaining parts, the open-book quiz and the full glossary. Free to start; Premium unlocks everything.
- 2The battery that needed cobalt
- 3A battery that makes its own oxygen
- 4Why cobalt is still there
- 5Designing cobalt out
Open-book quiz8 questions whose answers are in the text.
Glossary7 terms explained in a tap.
30 languagesThe same course, from French to Japanese.
