Some years ago at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I taught a one-semester inorganic course for BS chemistry majors. During the class we covered all the noncarbon elements in a ...

The periodic table, also called the periodic table of elements, is an organized arrangement of the 118 known chemical elements. The chemical elements are arranged from left to right and top to bottom ...

In 1869, a professor at the University of St. Petersburg, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907), devised a diagram in which he arranged the approximately 60 known chemical elements by order of ...

For the ancient Greeks, there were four of them – earth, air, fire and water. That idea turned out to be far too simple to explain the diversity of matter we encounter in everyday life. But the basic ...

Brian Resnick was Vox’s science and health editor and is the co-creator of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about unanswered questions in science. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry ...

Your Vox Membership goes further this holiday season. When you buy an annual membership, we’ll give one to someone who can’t afford access. It’s a simple way for you to support Vox’s journalism and ...

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.--Carl Sagan Almost all ...