Iron for Dummies

Iron smelter

It's been a long, long time since the last time we exposed a freelancer toiling away at the now essentially moribund content farm InfoBarrel.com; but we recently happened upon some garbage content published courtesy of one of the site's owners, Kevin Hinton. Apparently Hinton's education in business and computer science was somewhat light on hard science, especially chemistry, which may explain why he included a number of boo-boos in the post he titled "Interesting Facts About Iron (Fe)."¹

Over the years, Kevin dashed off a number of similar "fact-light" articles about the different chemical elements, one of which (the one he wrote  about silicon) we featured on the site near the dawn of time; at least as far as the Antisocial Network goes. He didn't do much better this time around, as we noticed from claims like these found in his introduction:

"Iron is the most common element on the planet Earth..." – Depends on what you mean by "common": by volume, silicon is most common but, since iron is most massive, it's the most common by mass. You need to be clear, Kev. "...when it is smelted with carbon, it becomes a super strong element..." – When smelted with carbon, it's no longer an element: it's the alloy steel. Not content with just those blunders, Hinton then pounded out ten "interesting facts," some of which are... questionable.

• Fact 2: "Large stars such as the sun contain many times the amount of iron as the earth." – But, Kevin: they also have many thousand times the mass of Earth! And that's not to mention that our Sun isn't considered "large"; it's actually a fairly puny type of star, a yellow dwarf.
• Fact 5: "The Iron Pillar located in Delhi is said to be over 1600 years old and in all its time it has not corroded or rusted." – Well, it's corroded a little, Kevin, it's just (probably accidentally) more resistant to rust because of a coating of high-phosphorus crystalline iron.
• Fact 7: "A new strain of bacteria called Halmonas Titanicae [sic] was discovered in 1991 on pieces of the wrecked ocean liner the R.M.S. Titanic. This new bacteria devours the iron of the sunken ship at an alarming rate and may have applications elsewhere where large amounts of iron are needed to be disintegrated quickly." – Halmonas titanicae is halophilic, meaning it requires hypersaline water to thrive. It wouldn't be much use on land...

Like that of many a freelancer before (and, sadly, after) him, Hinton's work suffers from superficiality and (probably) a level of scientific illiteracy. Small wonder that modern educators, at least the ones who think about it, have become increasingly concerned about the level of STEM literacy; and small wonder we hand out so many Dumbass of the Day awards in the sciences.

¹ InfoBarrel has deleted all user-generated content and become a "green" website, but this post can still be reead by using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   infobarrel.com/Interesting_Facts_About_Iron_Fe

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