The rare radioactive substance made its way from the United States to Russia on a commercial flight in June 2009. Customs officers balked at accepting the package, which was ensconced in lead ...

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 ...

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are using the 88-Inch Cyclotron to help steady the famous periodic table of elements one atom at a time where it's gone a ...

A research team has developed an AI technique capable of expediting the identification of materials with desirable characteristics. Using this technique, the team was able to discover high-performance ...

You are entirely forgiven for not knowing this, since they are not especially rare — cerium is about as common as copper. The problem is that they’re difficult to isolate and purify; it wouldn’t be ...

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 ...

A century and a half ago, a Russian chemistry professor published a classification of all the known elements, organized by atomic weight. Today, the system that he created for his students — plus some ...

If you wanted to create the world’s next undiscovered element, number 119 in the periodic table, here’s a possible recipe. Take a few milligrams of berkelium, a rare radioactive metal that can be made ...