For the first time, astronomers have definitively ID’d a specific heavy element forged by a neutron star merger. Theories of physics have long predicted that about half of the universe’s heavy ...

Kilonova: artist’s impression of merging neutron stars. (Courtesy: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick) The first spectroscopic evidence that heavy elements are created by the merger of two neutron ...

Today's post has less to do with the periodic table per se than with people's obsessions with it. I wrote my book partly to help people see beyond the table as just a flat chart hanging on the wall of ...