Helium

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called super fluid helium, a liquid with unique physical properties.
It has no freezing point, and its viscosity is zero; it passes readily
through minute cracks and pores and will even creep up the sides and over
the lip of a container. Helium-3, the lighter helium isotope of mass 3,
which has an even lower boiling point than ordinary helium, exhibits
markedly different properties when liquefied.
Because it is noncombustible, helium is preferred to hydrogen as
the lifting gas in lighter-than-air balloons; it has 92 percent of the
lifting power of hydrogen, although it weighs twice as much. Helium is used
to pressurize and stiffen the structure of rockets before takeoff and to
pressurize the tanks of liquid hydrogen or other fuel in order to force
fuel into the rocket engines. It is useful for this application because it
remains a gas even at the low temperature of liquid hydrogen. A potential
use of helium is as a heat-transfer medium in nuclear reactors because ...

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