Paragominas | |
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State | |
Country | |
Capital | |
Population | 103775 |
Paragominas is a municipality in the state of Pará in the Northern region of Brazil, Paragominas attracted national attention on December 12, 1969, when Chinese citizen, naturalized Brazilian, Chi Mae-Stang (智美堂) - member of the Chinese Christian Missions, and defender of the rural poor in the Amazon Forest - was murdered there.
Cobalt | |
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State | Ontario |
Country | Canada |
Capital | |
Population | 1128 |
Cobalt is a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27. Like nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal.
Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment-producing minerals; they were so named because they were poor in known metals, and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold.
Today, some cobalt is produced specifically from one of a number of metallic-lustered ores, such as cobaltite (CoAsS). The element is, however, more usually produced as a by-product of copper and nickel mining.