the.com/phosphorus
the element that glows in the dark, fuels life, and burns down cities with equal enthusiasm
means A highly reactive nonmetallic chemical element (symbol P) essential to living cells, used in matches, fertilizers, and incendiary weapons, and known for forms that glow faintly in air.
from From the Greek 'phosphoros,' meaning 'light-bringer' — literally 'phos' (light) plus 'phoros' (bearer). The Greeks used it as a name for the planet Venus, the morning star that heralded the dawn. When a 17th-century alchemist isolated the glowing substance (the story goes that he was boiling down vats of urine in search of gold and got an eerie cold light instead), the old star-name was the obvious fit for something that seemed to carry light of its own.
named forthe Greek for light-bringer, an old name for Venus
discoveryboiled from buckets of human urine in 1669
in your DNAits backbone is held together by phosphorus
white phosphorusignites on contact with air, burns to the bone
bottleneck of lifecrops fail without it, and reserves are finite