From the campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

Here's your host, Scott Bertram.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome into another edition

of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this episode, we'll talk with Dr. Courtney Mayett from Hillsdale

College about the helium shortage. Myron Magnet joins us to talk about his new book, Clarence Thomas

in the Lost Constitution. We'll dig into Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

with Lorraine Murphy from Hillsdale and Lee Habib from Salem Media and Our American

Stories on storytelling. But first, we're joined now by Dr. Courtney Mayett, Associate

Professor of Chemistry here at Hillsdale College. Dr. Mayett, thanks for joining us.

Glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

So people might have seen in the headlines recently, and actually the story goes back some

years. I recall hearing about it previously, but now Party City is closing some stores,

and maybe it's due to the helium shortage. And so we wanted to talk to you today about

helium and about the shortage.

Let's start from the start and get some basics down.

What is helium? Where do we find it? Where do we get it from?

Okay. Well, you know, first a little disclaimer. I'm an organic chemist, and helium is not an organic element.

So you might want to say I'm a little out of my element for this interview.

But no, helium is a first row element, and it is a monotomic element, meaning that it is just the symbol that you see, HE, means that that atom in itself is also considered to just be its own element. I don't know if that makes a whole lot of sense. So when you talk about, say, a gas like hydrogen, we think of hydrogen as just H with a little dot, a little valence electron,

but the hydrogen gas is actually two of those that has a covalent bond.

Helium has no bond.

It is itself an element.

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