In the wee hours of the late 17th century, Isaac Newton could be found locked up in his laboratory prodding the secrets of nature. Giant plumes of green smoke poured from cauldrons of all shapes and ...

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 ...

When it comes to the discovery of elements on the periodic table, you can divide the world into two parts—Ytterby, and everywhere else. Ytterby ("itt-ter-bee") is a village on a speck of an island ...

If you ever want to open a chemistry theme restaurant, you should be sure to furnish it with 118 tables — one for each element. Note that it could not be a Greek restaurant, because then the number of ...

The periodic table of the elements, principally created by the Russian chemist, Dmitry Mendeleev (1834-1907), celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. It would be hard to overstate its importance ...

Volunteers at Wayne State University in Detroit had been braving the elements for hours on an October morning. The wind chapped cheeks and numbed fingers as volunteers wrangled giant blue tarps with ...

Eric Scerri's delightful "The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance" follows the 1969 classic by J. W. Spronsen, "The Periodic System of Chemical Elements," but is a different treatment of ...