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 ...

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 of chemical elements, often called the periodic table, organizes all discovered chemical elements in rows (called periods) and columns (called groups) according to increasing atomic ...

One hundred fifty years after Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published his system for neatly arranging the elements, the periodic table it gave birth to hangs in every chemistry classroom in the ...

Every field of science has its favorite anniversary. For physics, it’s Newton’s Principia of 1687, the book that introduced the laws of motion and gravity. Biology celebrates Darwin’s On the Origin of ...