Terbium

Character – Tb – Ting Bo – Nickname Bo – Stripper with the Masters of Disguise

Bo is an athlete from Harbin, China who joins the Masters of Disguise on their pan China tour to launch a new beer for women. Eye candy for the female gaze, his role may be small, but his impact is important.

Extract from The Chemical Reaction

‘I think you have some explaining to do, Jaq Silver.’

‘As do you, Timur Zolotoy.’

She bit her lip to stop herself crying with pain when they carried her to the car. Lying on the back seat, she slept as Speedy drove them into the mountains, waking when they stopped outside a stone-clad guest house. The view over the valley was obscured by thick mustard-coloured smog. Four men came out to greet them. She recognised Holger, the giant water baby, and Ernest, the redhead from Durham, but the other two, one dark-skinned, one Chinese, were just a blur of beauty. Timur introduced her to Eusébio and Ting Bo. Alone in a house in the mountains with five beautiful men, and she couldn’t even breathe properly. What a bloody waste.

Emperoro Qianlong Jade treasure – Phoenix jade qong

An Imperial white jade ‘phoenix’ vessel, gong, Qianlong (1736-1795); 19cm high.

Terbium metal – Atomic number 65, atomic mass 258.925

Named (along with yttrium, erbium and ytterbium) after the village of Ytterby in Sweden where the mineral Ytterbite was found, Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander discovered terbium as a chemical element in 1843 but Terbium was not isolated in pure form until the 1950s, using ion exchange techniques.

Terbium is used in CD’s and other magneto-optic recording media, fiber-optics, lasers, phones and tablets, energy-efficient light bulbs, wind turbines and electric cars.

It’s also is used in screens to improve the safety of medical x-rays, allowing the same quality image to be viewed after a much shorter exposure time.

Euro banknotes contain terbium, which glows green under UV light (in a pattern beside  red from europium, and blue from thulium) to deter counterfeiters.

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The Chemical Reaction by Fiona Erskine is published by the PointBlank imprint of Oneworld and is availablehere