When we think of uses for helium, most everyone immediately thinks of party balloons, blimps, and high-pitched voices. However, the uses for helium go far beyond just a few novelties. (Never inhale helium, by the way. It can kill you.) In fact, without helium, we may have never had our supermarket checkouts, iPhones, or even the ability to detect tricky cancers.
Below are the different uses for helium that you probably didn’t know existed.
Two Eagles pilots Leonid Tiukhtyaev and Troy Bradley have broken the two most coveted world records in ballooning after floating from Japan to Mexico in a helium-filled balloon.
It’s the largest, most complex machine ever built and has become one of the coldest places on planet Earth. Without helium however, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is nothing more than a $9 billion tube.
We’re nearly halfway through 2015 now and the first half of the year brought us a bizarre new trend among teens and adults alike: helium burping. Yep, it makes a funny noise. What isn’t funny about helium burping is that it is unbelievably dangerous and it can have fatal results.
Let us make this blatantly clear: HELIUM BURPING CAN KILL YOU.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has discovered a massive reserve of helium underneath Yellowstone that is believed to be 2,000,000,000 (yes, billion) years old— and it’s escaping by the second.
Inside the hard disk drive (HDD) in your computer is what resembles a short stack of small DVDs. Called platters, these oscillating, magnetic disks are where data is recorded and transferred, and are the reason why you can turn off your computer without losing your files.
So, what does helium have to it?
Almost exactly two years from the date of Felix Baumgartner’s hugely hyped, Red Bull-sponsored space dive, a computer scientist quietly and secretly dove from an even higher elevation from under his own helium balloon.
What’s the best way to demonstrate the effectiveness of your product if you’re a smartphone case manufacturer? Put an iPhone in its protective case, strap it to a helium balloon and send it up into the stratosphere. And that’s exactly what Urban Armor Gear (UAG) did in their recent marketing effort.
The smallest known vortexes, with cores just an atom in diameter, have been discovered hidden inside tiny droplets of helium.
Perhaps the most interesting fact in the recorded history of helium is where it was discovered. We didn’t find it on our planet. In fact, it was first discovered over 92,900,000 miles away from Earth.
August 18 of 1868— a full 93 years before the first human went into space, French astronomer Pierre-Jules Janssen spotted an odd yellow line in the