Bismuth sits in a funny spot on the periodic table, at the turning point of what I call "poisoner's corridor." It cleaves the periodic table into two sets of dangerous elements. To the left of and ...

To many it’s the baffling wall chart you stared at in boredom during chemistry lessons. Others may recognise the little numbered and lettered squares from the title sequence of TV hit Breaking Bad.

Most of the time we don't think about the periodic table. Individual elements are always important—gold, oxygen, aluminum—but we rarely consider the table as a whole. It just hangs on the wall where ...

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 ...

In the final programme in our Elements series, Justin Rowlatt looks at the rarest and oddest members of the periodic table. What are they, and what are they used for? Show more In the final programme ...

HITHERTO it has seemed that thallium was the only heavy metal with but slight tendency to form water-insoluble normal and inner-complex salts with organic compounds of acid character. Monovalent ...