Today (8 Feb) marks the birthday of Dmitri Mendeleev, one of the best-known chemists. His name is synonymous with the periodic table; though he wasn’t the first to attempt to organise the elements into a table, his use of his own table to predict the properties of undiscovered elements gave him prominence. This graphic looks at the elements known at the time he constructed his table and the elements whose properties he predicted.
Today in Chemistry History American chemists Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben discovered the isotope carbon-14. This graphic takes a quick look at the carbon-14 isotope and how it can be used to estimate the age of biological materials.
On 1 March in 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity. This graphic summarises his discovery.
Today marks the birthday of Antoine Lavoisier, one of the key figures in chemistry history and often referred to as ‘the father of modern chemistry’. This short graphic takes a look at some of his key contributions to chemical understanding and the system of naming chemical substances we still use today.
The Bunsen burner is one of the ubiquitous symbols of chemistry. Though it might be a rarer sight in university laboratories these days, due to some of the highly flammable substances used, they’re still very commonly found in school science classrooms, and for most of us probably bring back memories of school science lessons. As today is Bunsen Burner Day, this graphic takes a quick look at the burner’s anatomy, and we’ll discuss its history in a little more detail below.
On this day (26 February) in 1946, Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail was born. Zewail pioneered femtochemistry, the use of laser pulses to see the movement of individual atoms during chemical reactions. This graphic gives an overview of the ultrafast laser spectroscopy that makes this possible.
