Millions of light-years away, millions of years ago, a star exploded. In this violent process, it ejected incredible amounts ...

Everything we can see and touch, and quite a lot that we can’t as well, is made of tiny particles called atoms. Some substances, like particles of this iron, contain only one kind of atom. Iron is an ...

If you were to take every element in the periodic table and order them by how abundant they are in the Universe, you'd find something a little bit surprising. The most common element is hydrogen, ...

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Immediately after the Big Bang, before the first stars in the Universe ever formed, the Universe consisted of hydrogen (element #1), helium (element #2), and pretty much nothing else. Despite ...

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 ...

On a stage in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization headquarters in Paris, Yuri Oganessian holds a microphone in one hand and a small remote control in the other. Over ...

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of 17 metallic elements essential in many modern technologies. Despite their name, they are not actually rare, but they are difficult to extract and refine. In ...

There are lots of different substances but only just over a hundred elements. An element is a substance that is made up of only one kind of atom. The atoms in a particular element are the same as each ...