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Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Justin Rowlatch. Regular listeners will by now be familiar with this program's

continuing adventure into elemental economics. We've explored the role all sorts of important

elements play in the world economy, including carbon, nitrogen and gold. Today, it is the turn

of an element you've probably never heard of, vanadium.

So we've gone from yellow to green to turquoise. And if we keep shaking for another few minutes,

we will eventually end up with a violet colour. We'll be discovering that vanadium is

multifaceted as well as multicolored on Business Daily from the BBC.

So one is vanadium. It is a silvery grey metal, and while it may not be well known, we've all got a little bit of it inside us.

Vanadium is an essential micronutrient for human beings and many other life forms.

We'll be diving into the weird world of vanadium biology later. But first, I've made my own now very familiar journey over to the

laboratory of Professor Andrea Seller of University College London to get the lowdown on this

transition metal. Vanadium is a really important metal, particularly for its allowing properties.

It's something that you can add in small quantities to steal.

And what I would urge all listeners to do is to open up a toolbox, right,

which has some drill bits or alternatively a spanner, a wrench.

And if you take a look at this one, look, it says Bedford vanadium.

Right, vanadium. So small amounts of vanadium

added into steel are able to really change its mechanical properties in a big way. So what it does

is it kind of stiffens and strengthens drill bits. It makes spanners that much sort of longer lived.

And of course, you know, my interest is in cycling,

and there's some fantastic new bicycle tubing.

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