Periodic Table

Controlling how oxygen reacts is important for improving technologies such as batteries, fuel cells and environmentally sustainable chemical processes. A research team led by professor Seung Jun Hwang from KAIST's Department of Chemistry has developed a molecular system capable of directing oxygen activation along a selected electron-transfer pathway.

Brown University chemists have provided direct evidence that upends the textbook explanation of how triple chemical bonds work in heavy elements. In a study published in Science, the researchers show evidence that when atomic nuclei are sufficiently heavy, the principles described in Einstein's theory of relativity change the structure of triple bonds—blurring the lines between the two separate types of bonds involved in textbook triple bonding.

Cross-coupling reactions have revolutionized the synthesis of complex pharmaceuticals and polymers from simpler, commercially available products. An important first step in these reactions is oxidative addition, which is often facilitated using transition metals such as palladium and nickel. However, achieving the same transformation with more abundant main-group elements, found in groups 1–2 and 13–18 of the periodic table, remains a major challenge for many important substrates, […]

Plutonium is one of the most complex elements in the periodic table. First synthesized and isolated in 1940 by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, plutonium has been studied closely for more than eight decades. It's most often associated with its role in nuclear security, but it's also vital to nuclear power, where it is produced in reactors and can be recycled as fuel. Despite plutonium's importance, some of its most fundamental behaviors remain a mystery.

Researchers have directly visualized a rare type of chemical bond between some of the heaviest elements in the periodic table, providing experimental evidence of how these atoms share electrons in systems where this has been difficult to prove.