What is "cobalt"

Cobalt \Co"balt\ (k[=o]"b[o^]lt; 277, 74), n. [G. kobalt, prob. fr. kobold, kobel, goblin, MHG. kobolt; perh. akin to G. koben pigsty, hut, AS. cofa room, cofgodas household gods, Icel. kofi hut. If so, the ending -old stands for older -walt, -wald, being the same as -ald in E. herald and the word would mean ruler or governor in a house, house spirit, the metal being so called by miners, because it was poisonous and troublesome. Cf. Kobold, Cove, Goblin.]

1. (Chem.) A tough, lustrous, reddish white metal of the iron group, not easily fusible, and somewhat magnetic. Atomic weight 59.1. Symbol Co.

   Note: It occurs in nature in combination with arsenic, sulphur, and oxygen, and is obtained from its ores, smaltite, cobaltite, asbolite, etc. Its oxide colors glass or any flux, as borax, a fine blue, and is used in the manufacture of smalt. It is frequently associated with nickel, and both are characteristic ingredients of meteoric iron.

2. A commercial name of a crude arsenic used as fly poison.

   Cobalt bloom. Same as Erythrite.

   Cobalt blue, a dark blue pigment consisting of some salt of cobalt, as the phosphate, ignited with alumina; -- called also cobalt ultramarine, and Thenard's blue.

   Cobalt crust, earthy arseniate of cobalt.

   Cobalt glance. (Min.) See Cobaltite.

   Cobalt green, a pigment consisting essentially of the oxides of cobalt and zinc; -- called also Rinman's green.

   Cobalt yellow (Chem.), a yellow crystalline powder, regarded as a double nitrite of cobalt and potassium.

1680s, from German kobold "household goblin," Harz Mountains silver miners' term for rock laced with arsenic and sulfur (so called because it degraded the ore and made the miners ill), from Middle High German kobe "hut, shed" + *holt "goblin," from hold "gracious, friendly," a euphemistic word for a troublesome being. The metallic element was extracted from this rock. It was known to Paracelsus, but discovery is usually credited to the Swede George Brandt (1733), who gave it the name. Extended to a blue color 1835 (a mineral containing it had been used as a blue coloring for glass since 16c.). Compare nickel.

n. 1 A village in Connecticut 2 A town in Ontario. 3 An unincorporated community in Idaho.

n. a hard ferromagnetic silver-white bivalent or trivalent metallic element; a trace element in plant and animal nutrition [syn: Co, atomic number 27]

Cobalt is a chemical element with atomic number 27.

Cobalt may also refer to:

is a bimonthly anthology of shōjo fiction, published in Japan by Shueisha since May 1976. Shueisha also publish light novels under their Cobalt imprint, many of which were originally serialized in the magazine.

Cobalt is an action-oriented side-scrolling video game developed by Oxeye Game Studio and published by Mojang. It was released on 2 February 2016 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and the Xbox One consoles.

Cobalt is a black metal band with avant-garde metal, extreme metal and progressive metal influences from Greeley, Colorado, founded in 2002. Cobalt described themselves as "war metal" in their earlier stages. Cobalt have only toured live once in the US, including a performance at Maryland Death Fest in 2013.

Cobalt (Greek: αέρα κοβαλτίου ) is a new airline based in Cyprus that flew its first commercial flight on 7 July 2016. It is the second Cyprus-based airline since the dissolution of Cyprus Airways in 2015, after Tus Airways.

Cobalt is a chemical element with 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 by alchemists 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 upon smelting. 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 various metallic-lustered ores, for example cobaltite (Co As S), but the main source of the element is as a by-product of copper and nickel mining. The copper belt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and Zambia yields most of the cobalt mined worldwide.

Cobalt is primarily used in the preparation of magnetic, wear-resistant and high-strength alloys. The compounds, cobalt silicate and cobalt(II) aluminate (CoAlO, cobalt blue) give a distinctive deep blue color to glass, ceramics, inks, paints and varnishes. Cobalt occurs naturally as only one stable isotope, cobalt-59. Cobalt-60 is a commercially important radioisotope, used as a radioactive tracer and for the production of high energy gamma rays.

Cobalt is the active center of coenzymes called cobalamins, the most common example of which is vitamin B. As such, it is an essential trace dietary mineral for all animals. Cobalt in inorganic form is also micronutrient for bacteria, algae and fungi.

Cobalt is a parametric-based computer-aided design (CAD) and 3D modeling program that runs on both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. The program combines the direct-modeling way to create and edit objects (exemplified by programs such as SpaceClaim) and the highly structured, history-driven parametric way exemplified by programs like Pro/ENGINEER. A product of Ashlar-Vellum, Cobalt is Wireframe-based and history-driven with associativity and 2D equation-driven parametrics and constraints. It offers surfacing tools, mold design tools, detailing, and engineering features. Cobalt includes a library of 149,000 mechanical parts.

Cobalt's interface, which the company named the "Vellum interface" after its eponymous flagship product, was designed in 1988 by Dr. Martin Newell (who created the Utah teapot in 1975 and went on to work at Xerox PARC, where the WIMP paradigm for graphical user interfaces was invented) and Dan Fitzpatrick. The central feature of the Vellum interface is its "Drafting Assistant", which facilitates the creation and alignment of new geometry.

Cobalt has received praise for its free-form surfaces on solid modeled objects.