The periodic table is chemistry’s holy text. Not only does it list all of the tools at chemists’ disposal, but its mere shape – where these elements fall into specific rows and columns – has made profound predictions about new elements and their properties that later came true. But few chemists on Earth have a closer relationship with the document than Dawn...
by Dan Linehan | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Dawn Shaughnessy leads the Nuclear and Radiochemistry Group of the Physics and Life Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Berkeley Livermore Lab and uses the National Ignition Facility to generate some of the most extreme conditions in our solar system for high energy density experiments.
An artist’s rendering of a crewed Martian biomanufactory powered by photovoltaics and capable of synthesizing food and pharmaceuticals, manufacturing biopolymers and recycling biological waste. (Artwork credit: Davian Ho, UC Berkeley)
The high efficiency, light weight and flexibility of the latest solar cell technology means photovoltaics could provide all the power needed for...
The criteria for whether a new chemical element has been discovered are set to change, a provisional report by the International Unions for Pure and Applied Chemistry (Iupac) and Physics (Iupap) has announced.
The upper end of the periodic table. For each known isotope the element name, mass number and half-life are given. Colours are attributed to their decay mode: α-...
Photo: Nobel Laureate and professor, Harold Urey in his office at UC San Diego circa 1965-66. Photo by Ansel Adams, courtesy of the UC RIverside collection.
Berkeley Lab scientists Leticia Arnedo-Sanchez (from left), Katherine Shield, Korey Carter, and Jennifer Wacker had to take precautions against radioactivity as well as coronavirus to conduct experiments with the rare element, einsteinium. (Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab)
Since element 99 – einsteinium – was discovered in 1952 at...
Elements on the periodic table that make up the lanthanides, or rare-earth heavy elements.
Lanthanides are rare-earth heavy metals with useful magnetic properties and a knack for emitting light. Researchers had long assumed that lanthanides’ toxicity risk was low and therefore safe to implement in a number of high-tech breakthroughs we now take for...
Urey at his desk, photograph, circa late 1940s (Northwest Indiana Times)
Missoula first noticed Harold Urey in May of 1915, when the University of Montana announced the winners of the annual C.A. Duniway Scholarship Books. Urey, a 22-year-old freshman from Indiana by way of a mining camp in the Gallatin Mountains, received the biology award....
Scientists at Berkeley Lab’s predecessor, the UC Radiation Laboratory, discovered berkelium in 1949, and californium in 1950. Today, Berkeley Lab scientists are using state-of-the-art instruments at the Molecular Foundry to better understand how actinides like berkelium and californium could serve to accelerate...
Workers load uranium slugs into the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge in 1943. Image: Ed Westcott/US Army/Manhattan Engineer District.
On July 16 this year, on what marks the 75th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test, a patient may go to the doctor for a heart scan. A student may open her...
Dawn Shaughnessy leads the Nuclear and Radiochemistry Group of the Physics and Life Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Berkeley Livermore Lab and uses the National Ignition Facility to generate some of the most extreme conditions in our solar system for high energy density experiments.
