When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron’s twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion* does an energy-hungry star no...

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering...

Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.

Also unlike a planet, an electron—if excited by heat or light—can leap from its low-energy shell to an empty, high-energy shell. The electron cannot stay in the high-energy state for long, so it soon crashes...

Yet they enjoy the high. In the surest sign that selenium actually makes them go mad, cattle grow addicted to locoweed despite its awful side effects and eat it to the exclusion of anything else....

Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed...

was willing to bend nature to fit his grand philosophical scheme.” The only difference between Mendeleev and crackpottery is that Mendeleev was right: Lecoq de Boisbaudran soon retracted his data and published results that corroborated...

Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs’ vital organs the wrong color.

The color of the emitted light depends on the relative heights of the starting and ending energy levels. A crash between closely spaced levels (such as two and one) releases a pulse of low-energy reddish...

Today alpha equals 1/137.0359 or so. Regardless, its value makes the periodic table possible. It allows atoms to exist and also allows them to react with sufficient vigor to form compounds, since electrons neither roam...

All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live...