Which is more interesting? Niobium, Aluminium, Silver or Platinum?

Hardest to easiest: Niobium, Platinum, Aluminum, Silver Silver would be easy to be entertaining with; silver is useful for industry AND valuable. People have silver jewelry, flatware. It's a traded similar to gold.

There have been Silver Rushes that you can talk about. People have silver teeth fillings. Niobium would be very hard to make interesting.It has a few esoteric uses in manufacturing, mostly in making chemically stable alloys.

About the only interesting thing was it was mistakenly identified as a different metal for a while. If you are good public speaker/comedian and can work with the mistaken identity angle and make it funny, go for it. Platinum is valuable like silver but not quite as rich a history.

Certainly it is heavily used in industry, most notably in catalytic converters (make cars less polluting). Aluminum is cheap, everywhere but kind of boring. You can make it interesting by discussing where it is used since there are so many places it is used.

You can also talk about how aluminum was linked to alzheimers (webmd.com/alzheimers/guide/controversial...) Start with wikipedia but do primary research else where as well. In particular check out industry web sites such as silverinstitute.org/ or http://www.platinum.matthey.com/info/industry_links.html by googling search terms like "silver industry", "platinum mining", "uses for niobium". Check out how much these metals cost per gram as well.

Silver has been around (produced) the longest and has greater historical significance.

I have decided that niobium is the most interesting only because it is the one I knew the least about. Possibly your prof would consider it to be "a more difficult metal" since it is far less familiar than the other three. As ensorceled mentioned in his/her answer, one of the more interesting things about it was the 2 name/mistaken identity issue in its history.

You could focus on that aspect in your presentation. I, personally, kept thinking of "Rearden Metal" in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand when I read that it improves the strength of steel so much. I you have a literary-minded class or prof, you could work in some quotes from the book.As for an entertaining presentation, perhaps you could twitter some funny celebrities like @Michaelianblack or @aplusk (ashton kutcher) to see if they would give you a funny take on one or more of the metals.

Hope you get an A!

Niobium has a couple interesting points: It has been used to coat nuclear fuel pellets, and it is named after Niobe, the Greek goddess who turned to stone and cried eternally after Apollo and Athena killed all her children.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.