Good morning, John. 

Helium is very weird and I'm tired of people being wrong about it, so I've made a video here, that is everything a person needs to know about helium in four minutes.  

Helium is very special for three different reasons. 

First, it, along with its noble gas siblings on the periodic table are extremely un-reactive.  For physics reasons they are just extremely stable atoms and they do not chemically react.  

Second, helium is an element with a very small atom.  The only one smaller is hydrogen, and so it is physically small, and light.  Some might even say lighter than air.  

And finally, helium doesn't just not react chemically wth other stuff, it also just doesn't interact much with anything, including itself.   Basically, it is like the least sticky atom.  And when it's easier for atoms to stick together that makes it harder for them to be a gas, and easier for them to be a solid.  Because helium has so little stickiness you have to get it very cold for it to become a liquid, and it basically never becomes a solid.  Of literally everything in the world helium is the hardest thing to freesze.  

So we've got a gas that is very light, very small, never freezes, and is extremely un-reactive.  And that makes it useful for way more than just party balloons.  

You can use it in rocket engines to push on cryo-fuels like liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen without having to worry about it reacting or freezing.   

If you need something very cold you can surround it with liquid helium which will not freeze even at absolute zero, making it super useful for super-conducting magnets in MRIs and other scientific equipment.   

You can put it in pipes and equipment and spacesuits to find tiny, tiny, leaks, because the atoms are so small that they will pass through even the smallest  fractures.  

And you can surround vital manufacturing with it to prevent unwanted reactions with atmospheric gasses like oxygen when making semiconductors or doing high quality welding.  

No one piece of the helium-use pie is the biggest piece, it's used in a lot of things because it's a very useful gas.  

And you might have been told that we're running out of helium.  Which is kind of true, but also kind of not.  

A quarter of the known matter in the universe is helium, but that does not help us, because once it is in the atmosphere it floats to the top of the atmosphere and then gets knocked away by high energy particles from the sun and we can't get it back.  

The helium that we use is stuff that was trapped underground after radioactive elements decayed into other elements, including helium.  

Now, sometimes, the same formations that trapped the helium also trapped natural gas.  

And, so, basically, all of our helium is a by-product of pulling natural gas out of the ground to burn it in our stoves and to heat our houses.  

In fact, the majority of the helium that is pulled out of the ground in natural gas ends up being vented.  We don't even capture it, because it's very energy intensive to do that.  

And this was EXTRA not done for a very weird reason.  

Which is that the US had a gigantic, strategic reserve of helium, that it was eventually, like,  'actually we don't need this'.  

And so congress told teh Helium Reserve 'you have to sell all of your helium by a certain date. We don't care what price you sell it at.'  

Which, absolutely tanked the price of helium.  

Thus, natural gas producers had no incentive to invest in the equipment that refines helium from natural gas.  

But, as that supply has been sold off - which, as of now, I think is done with - and as the supply of helium has decreased, more is being captured.  

The bad news is that the long term goal is to leave the natural gas in the ground, because it and the products of its combustion are making the earth warmer, and so now, for like the first time ever, we have people specifically drilling for helium.  Which doesn't necessarily have to come along with natural gas.  

This has resulted in the discovery of a helium reserve in Tanzania which is big enough to fill 1.5 million MRI machines, and more helium resources have been found in Canada and Australia.  

As of now, because of pandemic-induced consumption increases and new production coming online, the helium shortage appears to be over.  

And with the discovery of new reserves and also a lot of the uses of helium, including MRIs and rocket launchers and manufacturers finding ways to capture and reuse the helium, because, of course, it doesn't get used up, it's an element that doesn't react with anything, I might have good news!  

We can all probably be a little less concerned about at least this one thing.  

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.  

Hank!  Why didn't you talk about The Awesome Socks Club at all?

A ha, because it's been going very well, and  I think that, regardless of what I say right now, it's gonna sell out in the next two days.  

We will stop selling Sunday at midnight, but also - according to my projections, we're not going to make it that far.  

So if you want to sign up, there's a link in the description.