The news broke that a railroad car, loaded with pure sodium, had just derailed and was spilling its contents. A television reporter called me for an explanation of why firefighters were not allowed to ...

The periodic table is like a map that organizes elements based on their atomic structure and properties. It helps scientists and students study and understand the vast variety of elements and how they ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The chemical elements—the varieties of atoms ...

Whether hung on classroom walls, put up in dorm rooms or screen-printed on T-shirts, the periodic table of elements screams, “Science!” like no other image. And why not? At 118 members and counting, ...

I highly recommend Wonderful Life with the Elements as a companion to the science classroom. Our world, everything we know, can be distilled into 188 elements. The very thought is fascinating in its ...

Alkali metals like lithium, sodium, and potassium are famous for their dramatic reactions with water, from fizzing to full-on explosions. Their single valence electron makes them eager to react, ...

The periodic table stares down from the walls of just about every chemistry lab. The credit for its creation generally goes to Dimitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist who in 1869 wrote out the known ...