Everything Matters | Boron | Ron Hipschman | Exploratorium

Boron is complicated. Elusive. Tough. Created in collisions between cosmic rays and interstellar dust, pure boron may be found in meteoroids, but not naturally on Earth. And yet this relatively uncommon element is essential for plant growth, and readily appears in compounds such as borax, famously conveyed by 20-mule teams across Death Valley. A brittle metalloid, boron behaves somewhat like a metal, somewhat like a non-metal. It can be reactive or unreactive. Crystalline or powdered. It can shift from three to four atomic bonds. Imagine boron as elemental spy: enigmatic except in its useful effects.