HOME |
RSS | 
Just because Talk Like A Pirate Day is over doesn’t mean that it’s too late to enjoy pirate stuff like Etsy seller YellowBugBoutique’s periodic elements pillow that happens to spell out “pirate.” It’s just perfect for all of you science-lovers out there with a penchant for swashbuckling.
Comments Off
Sam Kean wrote a book about the periodic table of elements called The Disappearing Spoon. When the Chinese edition came out, he was surprised by the cover art, which included some element icons that were sexually suggestive and others that didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Only a portion of the cover is shown here. He contacted the jacket designer, Bianco Tsai, who explained the thinking behind her choices for the illustration.
In the end, Tsai said, “I have to built a bridge to connect our culture to your book!” I still think her cover looks sharp, and if Tsai says that it bridges my book to Chinese culture, I believe her. If so, though, it’s a one-way bridge. Trying to decipher the cover still leads to an uncanny feeling for me. Something I’d labored over for years, and written and rewritten until I’d practically memorized it, had became alien. It’s what those poor characters in neurologist Oliver Sacks’ books must feel like when they suddenly have a stroke or something and can’t recognize their own faces in the mirror. It was yet another reminder that although the periodic table is universal, people’s reactions to it are anything but.
Read the reasons behind the element icons and see if they make sense to you, at Slate. Link -via Buzzfeed
Periodic Table Building Blocks - $33.95
Are you worried that your baby does not have a solid foundation in the academic discipline of chemistry? You need the Periodic Table Building Blocks from the NeatoShop. Remember, it is never too early to start memorizing elements.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more stimulating Toys & Games.
Comments Off 
Remember the periodic table you were taught back in high school chemistry? Well, it was wrong.
Scientists are revising the way atomic weights of 10 elements are displayed in a new Periodic Table:
The new table, outlined in a report released this month, will express atomic weights of 10 elements — hydrogen, lithium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, chlorine and thallium — in a new manner that will reflect more accurately how these elements are found in nature.
"For more than a century and a half, many were taught to use standard atomic weights — a single value — found on the inside cover of chemistry textbooks and on the periodic table of the elements. As technology improved, we have discovered that the numbers on our chart are not as static as we have previously believed," says Dr. Michael Wieser, an associate professor at the University of Calgary, who serves as secretary of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s (IUPAC) Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights. This organization oversees the evaluation and dissemination of atomic-weight values. [...]
The atomic weights of these 10 elements now will be expressed as intervals, having upper and lower bounds, reflected to more accurately convey this variation in atomic weight.
Link (Image: Chemists Do It Periodically on a Table by Chris Murphy from the NeatoShop)
Slate is starting a series of posts on the periodic table of elements, with author Sam Kean writing a separate post about each of about two dozen of the most interesting elements. The first entry is for antimony, which I believe, is the sexiest of the elements. It was widely used in alchemy, but had better results elsewhere.
Egyptian women used one form of antimony, stibium, as eyeliner (hence the symbol for antimony, Sb, even though neither letter appears in the element’s name). Pills of the element became popular as a medicine in the 1700s, especially as a laxative, able to blast through the most compacted bowels. It was so good the chronically constipated would root through their excrement to retrieve the pill and reuse it later. Some lucky families passed down antimony laxatives from generation to generation.
Unfortunately, antimony purges the bowels so well partly because it’s poison—the body wants to get rid of it. But these were the days in medicine of fighting fire with fire: Doctors believed the only way to cure a violent illness was with an equally violent reaction to medicine, and antimony’s popularity grew.
Other elements will be posted through the month of July. Link to introduction. Link to antimony.
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
Archaeologists
Do It in the Dirt, design by Chris
Murphy - $14.95
|
|
 |
 |
 |
A new addition to our growing line of cheeky Scientists Do It T-Shirts, here's one for all you archaeologists. I hear they'll date any old thing: Link
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.
This periodic table of cupcakes is for a chemistry nerd’s birthday party. Each cake is labeled with an element and color-coded by its state of matter. I hear hydrogen and helium are very light and fluffy. Looks like someone already ate ununseptium. Link -via reddit
Element 112 has been officially added to the Periodic Table as "copernicium," in honor of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
Copernicus deduced that the planets revolved around the Sun, and finally refuted the belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.
The team of scientists who discovered the element chose the name to honour the man who "changed our world view". [...]
"After IUPAC officially recognised our discovery, we agreed on proposing the name (because) we would like to honour an outstanding scientist," said Professor Hofmann.
Previously on Neatorama: Element 112 to be Officially Added to the Periodic Table
Comments Off 
The Periodic Table of Elements is getting a new addition.
Sigurd Hofmann and colleagues at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany produced the superheavy 112 back in 1996, and now it’s going to be officially added to the Periodic Table as soon as a name for the element is chosen:
"The new element is approximately 277 times heavier than hydrogen, making it the heaviest element in the periodic table," the scientists at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research said in a statement late on Wednesday.
The zinc and lead nuclei were fused to form the nucleus of the new element, also known as Ununbium, Latin for 112.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), confirmed the discovery of 112 by the team led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Helmholtz Center. IUPAC has asked for an official name for the element to be submitted.
John Jost, executive director of IUPAC in North Carolina, told Reuters that creating new elements helped researchers to understand how nuclear power plants and atomic bombs function.
They should hold an Internet poll – the winner will surely be Mootium.
Inspired by a the Periodic Table of Cartoon Characters by Andrew Speers of Old Man Musing, the folks at I Heart Chaos made one of their own. This time, with video game characters:
As far as my criteria for what went where, I tried to give room first to characters who are primarily and originally video game characters, but not always. Batman for example, is first a comic book character, but there were some pretty kickass Batman games, the one for NES in particular. Same with Homer Simpson– he’s primarily a cartoon character, but he’s appeared in more video games than most of the other characters on the table. For Hf, after not even finding a Pokemon or Star Wars character that had an H or an f in their name, I had to resort to Heifer from Rocko’s Modern Life, since there was a Rocko game for the SNES. Stupid Hf.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by cbz3000.
Theodore Gray has created a rather uncommon table. He has transformed the Periodic Table of Elements into an actual table, a coffee table to be exact. But this table doesn’t just depict element names and numbers, it also stores samples of each.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
If you’re anything like me, you can open your fridge and immediately find several condiments you haven’t used in months… maybe even years. I know we have a bottle of soy sauce lurking in ours that’s probably from, oh, 2007. According to the Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad, that Kikkoman needs to be tossed immediately. Cheez Wiz, however, has an indefinite shelf life. Scary. If you’re wondering about some of your condiments, check it out – it has a total of 75, so the odds are pretty good that you’ll find your answer.
