periodic table group names world of chemistry

Semiconductor engineers have used different combinations of elements from the III and V columns of the periodic table to create new semiconductor alloys, such as gallium nitride (GaN) and indium nitride (InN), each having different advantages. The semiconductor industry has used the periodic table to go beyond standard silicon-based devices. If you like engineering, the periodic table is the ultimate canvas for innovation. For instance, tennessine comes from the state of Tennessee, the home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which performed key work to produce this particular element. Naming elements after places has also been trending. More recently discovered elements have tended to be named after real people, such as meitnerium (Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner was a co-discoverer of nuclear fission). The element vanadium is named after the Norse goddess Vanadis. Some elements are named after towns: Strontium comes from the Scottish village of Strontian, where the mineral containing the element was found. So, if you love history, literature and words, the periodic table is for you. As for the former, Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran named the element “gallia,” after Gaul, the Iron Age region that includes present-day France. As you may have guessed, the latter was named after Germany (the home country of discoverer Clemens Winkler). The genius of Mendeleev was that he left spaces for elements yet to be discovered, and in so doing he predicted their existence, such as gallium in 1875 and germanium in 1886. For example, atoms in the rightmost column, known as the noble gases, may differ greatly in mass from light (helium) to heavy (such as radon), but what they have in common is that they don’t ordinarily participate in chemical reactions. Atomic elements in the same columns and rows have certain properties in common. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, created the first periodic table by arranging the atomic elements into columns and rows. It’s amazing how one element in the periodic table is found in so many different kinds of stuff in our world. And, yet, despite its importance, it’s a rarity compared with ordinary hydrogen, the most abundant ingredient in water, most stars and the universe in general. So, already you can see this one isotope’s importance in astronomy, pharmaceuticals and energy. (Alas, no prize for NIST’s Ferdinand Brickwedde. It was discovered in the 1930s at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, then known as the National Bureau of Standards), where it was identified by Harold Urey of Columbia University, who won a Nobel Prize for the feat. The deuterium isotope helps create heavier elements inside stars, makes certain drugs more effective, and could be the key ingredient for making clean fusion energy. For example, hydrogen usually only has one proton and no neutrons, but an isotope known as deuterium or “heavy hydrogen” also contains one neutron. If there are fewer or more electrons than protons, the atom is electrically charged and known as an ion.Įach atom can have several different versions, known as isotopes, in which there are different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. If there are an equal number of electrons and protons, the atom is electrically neutral. Hydrogen has one proton, so its atomic number is 1, and uranium has 92, so its atomic number is … 92. The one feature that defines an atomic element is its atomic number, that is, the number of protons it has in its nucleus. Zooming in on the nucleus a little more, we find positively charged particles known as protons and neutral particles known as neutrons. Each of these building blocks, known as atomic elements, contains a positively charged core (known as the nucleus) that is (usually) surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged particles called electrons. To date, humans have observed 118, both natural and artificially made. It’s a chart of all the chemical building blocks of matter. It’s also about mathematics and engineering and even nonscientific areas of knowledge including history, geography and the origins of words.įirst, a quick review of what the periodic table is.

This is the International Year of the Periodic Table, and while I’ve been (accurately) accused of being a physics fanboy, I’m here to tell you that this famous chart isn’t just about physics, chemistry and the other sciences.

Periodic table group names world of chemistry