Our modern lives depend on rare earth elements, and someday soon we may not have enough to meet growing demand. Because of their special properties, these 17 metallic elements are crucial ingredients ...

Somehow, even without silicon, this star was surrounded by dust. The dust grains were made almost entirely of iron. This has ...

How heavy can an element be? An international team of researchers has found that ancient stars were capable of producing elements with atomic masses greater than 260, heavier than any element on the ...

Long before there was a periodic table of the elements, there was no need for a table — just four chairs. From ancient through medieval into early modern times, natural philosophers could count the ...

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 ...

Bits of the stars are all around us, and in us, too. About half of the abundance of elements heavier than iron originates in some of the most violent explosions in the cosmos. As the universe churns ...

Four new elements have four new names: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson. These names correspond to elements 113, 115, 117 and 118, which scientists announced they had found in January, ...

At the far end of the periodic table is a realm where nothing is quite as it should be. The elements here, starting at atomic number 104 (rutherfordium), have never been found in nature. In fact, they ...

The iconic chart of elements has served chemistry well for 150 years. But it’s not the only option out there, and scientists are pushing its limits. By Siobhan Roberts When Sir Martyn Poliakoff, a ...

“LA république n’a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes.” With that curt dismissal a court in revolutionary France cut short the life of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, argued by some to be the ...

Welcome to the world, elements 113, 115, 117 and 118! Four new elements will join more than a hundred others on the periodic table of the elements, the International Union of Pure and Applied ...