This week's element is thallium, which goes by the symbol Tl and the atomic number, 81. Thallium was discovered in 1861 by spectroscopy and named by British chemist Sir William Crookes. Its name comes ...

This test, which involves a small amount of a radioactive substance injected intravenously, measures the blood flow to your heart when you’re resting and active. A thallium stress test is an imaging ...

Thallium, the substance that seems to have caused the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko to be admitted to a London hospital, is frequently referred to as the poison of choice. A colourless, ...

The first sign that something was wrong was numbness in his feet. Then things got rapidly and severely worse. It was August 2012, and soon, a chemistry PhD student in the UK would be fighting for his ...

The lightest member of group 13 in the periodic table, boron, has been used in medicine for centuries and serves a wide variety of industrial applications; what would a chemist do without borosilicate ...

In 1994, Chinese university student Zhu Ling began experiencing stomach pain, hair loss and partial paralysis. By the time doctors diagnosed Ling with thallium poisoning about four months later, she ...

Thallium, the substance which has poisoned ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, is a highly-toxic heavy metal. Although it used to be commonly found in rat poisons and insecticides, since the ...