#actinides

Scientists discover f-block metals yield new oxygen-binding chemistry

Iron and oxygen bind together throughout the body. Most famously, iron binds dioxygen, or two oxygens paired with each other, in hemoglobin that transports oxygen through blood. But iron-oxo compounds, as they're called, are found in many other places throughout the body. For example, the highly reactive iron-oxo is used in liver enzymes that metabolize drugs. Rice University chemist Raúl Hernández Sánchez was interested in how oxygen could react with other types of metals—ones that reside on the lowest section of the periodic table, known as f-block metals, with lanthanides on the upper row and actinides on the lower. If lanthanides could bind with oxygen, he theorized, it would form a highly reactive lanthanide-oxo compound that potentially could be used as a synthetic replacement for iron-oxo, opening up a new toolbox for small molecule chemists interested in studying these biological reactions.

…uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium…

I wrote a cool story that is chemistry related. It is entirely the Periodic Table of Elements. Specifically the “Planet Elements”/the Actinides and Transactinides. If you like those elements, I think you’ll like this story!

This story is 14,004 words excluding titles and the authors note, and includes lots of dialogue and interactions between elements, whose personalities are inspired by their properties among other things. There’s some mild worldbuilding, but mostly the true appearance of everything is left to the imagination. If this interests you, maybe click the link!

I’m bad at summaries, I’ll see if I can write one later. If you read and/or finish the story, please reblog this or send me an ask telling me how you felt! I’d really appreciate it. I’d love to see what Tumblr thinks of my story, considering it’s my first real one.

ATOMStober

Day 2. Lamp

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Roy: my wife is Riza and she doesn’t need my protection but if you hurt her you better run

Americium, curium and californium—crystallizing the rarest elements

Actinides are a group of heavy, radioactive elements that include uranium, plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium and californium. Understanding how these elements bond with other atoms (known as coordination chemistry), how they behave in water and how they can be separated from one another is crucial for safer nuclear waste management, new reactor technologies and advanced materials. However, because heavier elements, like curium and californium, do not occur naturally and must be synthesized in specialized nuclear reactors through long, multistep processes, only tiny amounts are available for research. As a result, they are exceptionally difficult to study. Since californium's discovery in 1950, only a handful of its coordination compounds have ever been structurally characterized. Californium is the heaviest element on the periodic table for which pure compounds can be synthesized and characterized in laboratories.