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 ...

Scientists think an asteroid could contain previously unknown elements. Asteroid 33 Polyhymnia appears to be denser than the densest element in the Periodic Table. The densest naturally occurring ...

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Joint Working Party has announced the official names and symbols of the chemical elements formerly known as 113, 115, 117 and 118. The proposed ...

Unlike other rare earth elements, only minute quantities of synthetic promethium are available because it has no stable isotopes. For this study, the ORNL team produced the isotope promethium-147, ...

Since the turn of the century, six new chemical elements have been discovered and subsequently added to the periodic table of elements, the very icon of chemistry. These new elements have high atomic ...

A pinch of arsenic, a dash of krypton, a soupçon of tantalum, and a whole load of copper—these are just some of the 76 chemical elements that go into making modern automobiles, according to an ...

The heaviest element that humans have ever found is called oganesson. Each atom of the stuff packs a whopping 118 protons into its dense center. In contrast, hydrogen—the most abundant element in the ...

Element collecting can start harmlessly enough. A rainbow-hued bismuth crystal catches your eye at a science museum one day, you buy a sample or two, and the next thing you know, you’re spending ...

You may have noticed that the rock formations are very different colors. The rock formations on the left are from Red Rock State Park in Texas, and on the right is El Capitan Mountain in Yosemite ...

In 1937, a piece of molybdenum plate arrived at the University of Palermo in Sicily. It had been shipped from the University of California, Berkeley, where it had been part of Ernest Lawrence’s ‘atom ...