Hi all

A bit of a trivia question.

Attached is a link to Nature News, the chatty gee-whizz stories from the august journal Nature.  This one is about a materials scientist who is creating a reference collection of unusual materials [many weird synthetics].  It contains the following paragraphs:

'Miodownik trawls the globe in search of additions to his collection. On a recent trip to Australia, he found himself in the remote uranium-mining town of Broken Hill in New South Wales. He started hunting through antique shops there to find a special type of glass.

'Miodownik explains that in the early twentieth century people thought that radioactive materials had beneficial health properties. For this reason, they manufactured glassware containing uranium, especially in places such as Broken Hill that had an abundance of the element.

'In the Australian antique shops, Miodownik flashed an ultraviolet light on various glass pieces to find one that glowed, a sign that it contained uranium. When he found a bowl that did just that, he brought it back to London and added it to the library.

[full link - http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050328/full/050328-5.html]

Apart from the small matter of Broken Hill mining silver, lead and zinc and no appreciable uranium, nor being a notable decorative glass manufacturing centre, I was wondering from some of the many glass gurus on the list what added elements cause flourescence such as described.  Was Dr Miodownik's bargain hunting futile?

cheers

Denis