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deviantART user ComputerSherpa created a periodic table as a means of organizing the major tropes that can be found in popular stories. Pictured above is one small selection. When ComputerSherpa offered this to his classmates for critique, one cleverly suggested that it be used as a dartboard.
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Researchers at the University of Nottingham created a special birthday present for Martyn Poliakoff, a professor of chemistry. It’s a periodic table of the elments inscribed on the surface of a hair from Poliakoff:
Professor Poliakoff said: “Although the application was lighthearted I felt that it enabled us to show people how such nano writing is done. Our microscopist, Dr Mike Fay, made the whole operation seem so simple and really demystified it in a most appealing way.”
Previously: Periodic Table of Videos
In Popular Science, Bjorn Carey imagines a scenario in which all of the elements on the periodic table were present in the same location simultaneously:
Ramming the atoms together at 99.999 percent the speed of light—the top speed of particles in the Large Hadron Collider, at the CERN particlephysics lab near Geneva—might fuse a few nuclei, but it won’t make that cool Frankenstein element. More likely, they would meld into a quark-gluon plasma, the theoretical matter that existed right after the universe formed. “But they would last for a fraction of a second before degrading,” Tuckerman says. “Plus, you’d need 118 LHCs—one to accelerate each element—to get it done.”
The other approach, as explained by John Stanton, the director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas, would be to toss a pulverized chunk of each element or a puff of each gas into a sealed container and see what happens. No one has ever tried this experiment either, but here’s how Stanton thinks things would play out: “The oxygen gas would react with lithium or sodium and ignite, raising the temperature in the container to the point that all hell would break loose. Powdered graphite carbon would ignite, too. There are roughly 25 radioactive elements, and they would make your flaming stew a little dangerous. Flaming plutonium is a very bad thing. Inhaling airborne radioactive material can cause rapid death.”
Once things calmed down, Stanton says, the result would be as boring as the atoms-only scenario. Carbon and oxygen would yield carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Nitrogen gas is very stable, and would remain as is. The noble gases wouldn’t react, nor would a few of the metals, like gold and platinum, which are mostly found in their pure forms. The things that do react will form rust and salts. “Thermodynamics wins again,” he says. “Things will always achieve equilibrium, and in this case that’s a mix of common, stable compounds.”
Wikipedia user alchemist-hp is on a quest to take beautiful color photographs of every naturally occurring element. Pictured above is bismuth. At the link, you can view his German-language clickable periodic table of images.
Illustrator Russell Walks created a periodic table of imaginary elements that appeared in science fiction movies, television shows, and books. Among them is Wonderflonium, the rare element that Dr. Horrible needed to complete his freeze ray.
Organizing pop culture data into something resembling a periodic table or making crafts that resemble the actual periodic table of elements is a popular web meme that we’ve covered in some breadth here at Neatorama. Bill Keaggy took the meme one step further by organizing these periodic tables into a periodic table. Pictured above is a part of that table.
Natalie Dee of the webcomic Married to the Sea organized and categorized elemental smells into a periodic table. Sure, you can probably think of other smells, but they’re really just compounds of these, right?
Link via Geekologie | Natalie Dee’s Website
Chemist Mark Leach has a website filled with dozens of different periodic tables. Pictured above is one that illustrates Madelung’s Rule addressing electron sequencing. I have no idea what that means. Fortunately, there is another, more understandable periodical table filled with pretty elephants.
Link via The Presurfer | Image: Mark Leach
I’m not sure who is responsible for this chart, especially since there appear to be several versions available online, including a few for purchase. You can view a larger image at the link. If you look at the key in the lower left corner, ABV stands for “alcohol by volume”, IBU stands for “international bitterness units”, and SRM stands for “standard reference method” — a measurement of color.
In 2003, Wake Forest University students Nazila Alimohammadi and Anna Clark built this picnic table in the shape of the periodic table of elements. From a campus newspaper:
The two women students created the sculpture as part of a public art course taught in the fall by David Finn, associate professor of art. Students in the class were paired up and assigned to work with campus organizations in creating works for public display. “We wanted our project to be fun and functional without a lot of emotional or political content,” Clark says. An aspiring dentist, Alimohammadi had taken several chemistry classes and suggested working with that department. They devised their “Periodic Table” concept — a pun of the familiar Periodic Table of Elements configuration — and the department responded enthusiastically. Alimohammadi did the structural steel work and Clark hand-painted the surface tiles. The piece, which was dedicated in an informal picnic ceremony on April 15, is accurate in every detail, right down to the auxiliary lanthanides and actinides tables that constitute the table’s bench.
Link via Make | Image: Anonymous Make reader
The modern periodic table of elements has been attributed to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, which he published in 1869. Pictured above is a proposed alternative that is shaped like a circle in order to arrange atoms by relative size:
According to Mohd Abubakr from Microsoft Research in Hyderabad, the table can be improved by arranging it in circular form. He says this gives a sense of the relative size of atoms–the closer to the centre, the smaller they are–something that is missing from the current form of the table. It preserves the periods and groups that make Mendeleev’s table so useful. And by placing hydrogen and helium near the centre, Abubakr says this solves the problem of whether to put hydrogen with the halogens or alkali metals and of whether to put helium in the 2nd group or with the inert gases.
That’s worthy but flawed. Unfortunately, Abubakr’s arrangement means that the table can only be read by rotating it. That’s tricky with a textbook and impossible with most computer screens.
The great utility of Mendeleev’s arrangements was its predictive power: the gaps in his table allowed him to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. It’s worth preserving in its current form for that reason alone.
Link via Gizmodo | Article by Abubakr | History of the Periodic Table of Elements
All you science-lovers on Neatorama should appreciate this great sweater featuring the Periodic Table of Elements. The sleeves feature fungi and bacteria names. The creator made it for her husband, a microbiologist working in the pharmaceutical industry.
