Imagine an alien world with oceans of liquid metal. If such a world exists, metallic elements are likely the sources of the dissolved materials and particles in these oceans. Everything would be made ...

For life to develop on a planet, certain chemical elements are needed in sufficient quantities. Phosphorus and nitrogen are essential. Phosphorus is vital for the formation of DNA and RNA, which store ...

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of 17 metallic elements essential in many modern technologies. Despite their name, they are not actually rare, but they are difficult to extract and refine. In ...

A new “atlas” lists the predicted properties of two-dimensional materials that could be formed from many metallic elements in the periodic table. Since the isolation of graphene in 2004, researchers ...

Technetium was discovered in 1937 by Italian scientists Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè at the University of Palermo, Sicily. They isolated the element from a sample of molybdenum, which had been ...

Iron is the main ingredient in various forms of iron and steel, but the various types of metals contain other elements as well. Sometimes these elements are unwanted; other times they're intentionally ...

Of all the metallic chemical elements, tungsten (symbol W, atomic number 74) has the highest melting point at 3,422°C (6192°F; 3,695°K). This extremely high melting point (along with its high density ...