The periodic table has become an icon of science. Its rows and columns provide a tidy way of showcasing the elements — the ingredients that make up the universe. It seems obvious today, but it wasn’t ...

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 ...

The periodic table merges scientific inquiry, international politics, hero worship, desires for structure and desires for credit. Formally, the modern periodic table is a systematic arrangement of the ...

Could turning the periodic table on its head make some important aspects easier to understand and enthuse more people to study chemistry? This question is posed in an article published in Nature ...

The story of the fifteenth element began in Hamburg, in 1669. The unsuccessful glassblower and alchemist Hennig Brandt was trying to find the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that could turn ...

The periodic table of elements that most chemistry books depict is only one special case. This tabular overview of the chemical elements, which goes back to Dmitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer and the ...

Wow! The International Year of the Periodic Table started with a bang at C&EN. There is already so much activity surrounding IYPT that we can hardly contain our excitement. There is no doubt that 2019 ...

Six atoms may seem minuscule–especially if they exist for only fractions of a second–but they can have huge implications. The recent announcement that Russian and American scientists finally managed ...

Think of it, however, from the viewpoint of children sitting at their desks looking for the first time at Mendeleev’s table hanging on the classroom wall. The teacher rarely mentions any of the ...