The Nuclear War You Didn’t Notice

May 9, 2025 by Al Williams 7 Comments

We always enjoy [The History Guy], and we wish he’d do more history of science and technology. But when he does, he always delivers! His latest video, which you can see below, focuses on the Cold War pursuit of creating transfermium elements. That is, the discovery of elements that appear above fermium using advanced techniques like cyclotrons.

There was a brief history of scientists producing unnatural elements. The two leaders in this work were a Soviet lab, the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, and a US lab at Berkeley.

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Displaying The Time Is Elemental With This Periodic Table Clock

March 7, 2023 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

We see a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, so many now that it’s hard to surprise us. After all, there are only so many ways to divide the day into intervals, as well as a finite supply of geeky and quirky ways to display the results, right?

That’s why this periodic table clock really caught our eye. [gocivici]’s idea is a simple one: light up three different elements with three different colors for hours, minutes, and seconds, and read off the time using the atomic number of the elements. So, if it’s 13:03:23, that would light up aluminum in blue, lithium in green, and vanadium in red. The periodic table was designed in Adobe Illustrator and UV printed on a sheet of translucent plastic by an advertising company that specializes in such things, but we’d imagine other methods could be used. The display is backed by light guides and a baseplate to hold the WS2812D addressable LEDs, and a DS1307 RTC module gives the Arduino Nano a sense of time. The 3D printed frame of the clock has buttons for setting the time and controlling the clock; the brief video below shows it going through its paces.

We really like the attention to detail [gocivici] showed here; that UV printing really gave some great results. And what’s not to like about the geekiness of this clock? Sure, it may not be as action-packed as a game of periodic table Battleship, but it would make a great conversation starter.

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Google’s Periodic Table

August 13, 2021 by Al Williams 43 Comments

One of the nice things about the Internet is that you don’t need huge reference books anymore. You really don’t need big wall charts, either. A case in point: what science classroom didn’t have a periodic table of the elements? Now you can just look up an interactive one from Google. They say it is 3D and we suppose that’s the animations of the Bohr model for each atom. You can debate if it is a good idea to show people Bohr models or not, but it is what most of us learned, after all.

While the website is probably aimed more at students, it is a handy way to look up element properties and it is visually attractive, too. You probably remember, the columns are no accident in a periodic table, so the actual format doesn’t vary from one instance of it to another. However, we liked the col coding and the information panel that appears when you click on an element.

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Smartphone Controlled Periodic Table Of Elements

January 16, 2018 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that here at Hackaday, we’re about as geeky as they come. Having said that, even we were surprised to hear that there are people out there who collect elements. Far be it from us to knock how anyone else wishes to fill their days, but telling somebody at a party that you collect chemical elements is like one step up from saying you’ve got a mold and fungus collection at home. Even then, at least a completed mold and fungus collection won’t be radioactive.

But if you’re going to spend your spare time working on a nerdy and potentially deadly collection, you might as well put it into an appropriate display case. You can’t just leave your Polonium sitting around on the kitchen counter. That’s the idea behind the interactive periodic table built by [Maclsk], and we’ve got to admit, if we get to put it in a case this awesome we might have to start our own collection.

A large portion of this project is building the wooden display case itself as, strangely enough, IKEA doesn’t currently stock a shelving unit that’s in the shape of the periodic table. The individual cells and edge molding are made of pine, the back panel is MDF, and the front of the display is faced off with thin strips of balsa to cover up all the joints. Holes were then drilled into the back of each cell for the LED wiring, and finally the entire frame was painted white.

Each cell contains an WS2812B RGB LED, which at maximum brightness draws 60mA. Given the 90 cells of the display case, [Maclsk] calculated a 5.4A power supply would be needed to keep everything lit up. However, he found a 4A power supply that made his budget happier, which he reasons will be fine as long as he doesn’t try to crank every cell up to maximum at the same time. Control for the display is provided by an Arduino Nano and HC05 Bluetooth module.

The final piece of the project was the Android application that allows the user to control the lighting. But it doesn’t just change colors and brightness, it’s actually a way to visualize information about the elements themselves. The user can do things like highlight certain groups of elements (say, only the radioactive ones), or light up individual cells in order of the year each element was discovered. Some of the information visualizations are demonstrated in the video below, and honestly, we’ve seen museum displays that weren’t this well done.

We last caught up with [Maclsk] when he created a very slick robotic wire cutting machine, which we can only assume was put to work for this particular project. Too bad he didn’t have a robot to handle the nearly 540 soldering joints it took to wire up all these LEDs.

[via /r/DIY]

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Marguerite Perey: When The Lab Assistant Gets The Credit

November 28, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Most people obtain a bachelor’s degree before getting their masters, and even that is a prerequisite for a doctorate. Most people, however, don’t discover a new chemical element.

Marguerite Perey graduated with a chemistry diploma from Paris’ Technical School of Women’s Education in 1929, and applied for work at the Curie Institute, at the time one of the leading chemistry and physics labs in the world. She was hired, and put to work cataloging and preparing samples of the element actinium. This element had been discovered thirty years before by a chemist who had also been working in the Curie laboratory, but this was the height of the chemical revolution and the studies and research must continue.

When Marie Curie died in 1934, the discoverer of actinium, André-Louis Debierne, continued his research and Perey kept providing samples. Marguerite’s work was recognized, and in time she was promoted from a simple lab assistant to a radiochemist. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Marguerite was, at the time, the world’s leading expert in the preparation of actinium. This expertise would lead her to the discovery of the bottom left corner of the periodic table: francium, element 87, the least electronegative element, and arguably the most difficult naturally occurring element to isolate.

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Chemical Nomenclature

October 20, 2016 by Will Sweatman 38 Comments

Looking at the ingredient list of some popular processed foods will produce a puzzled look on the typical hacker’s face. Tricalcium phosphate, thiamine mononitrate, zinc proteinate, pyridoxine hydrocloride… just who the hell comes up with these names anyway? It turns out that there is a method to the madness of chemical name structures. Some of them are well known, such as sodium chloride (NaCl) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Others… not so much. In the early years of chemistry, chemical substances were named after their appearance, affects and uses. Baking soda, laughing gas and formic acid (formic is Latin for ant, and responsible for the sting in an ant bite) to name a few. As more and more chemical substances were discovered over time, a more structured naming convention was needed. Today, the above are known as sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3), nitrous oxide (N2O) and a type of carboxylic acid (R – COOH, think of the “R” as a variable) respectively.

In today’s article, we’re going to talk about this naming structure, so that next time you admire the back of soup can, you won’t look so puzzled. We’ll also cover several common definitions that every novice biohacker should be familiar with as well.

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Chemical Formulas 101

September 28, 2016 by Will Sweatman 33 Comments

It seems like every other day we hear about some hacker, tinkerer, maker, coder or one of the many other Do-It-Yourself engineer types getting their hands into a complex field once reserved to only a select few. Costs have come down, enabling common everyday folks to equip themselves with 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC mills and a host of other once very expensive pieces of equipment. Getting PCB boards made is literally dirt cheap, and there are more inexpensive Linux single board computers than we can keep track of these days. Combining the lowering hardware costs with the ever increasing wealth of knowledge available on the internet creates a perfect environment for DIYers to push into ever more specific scientific fields.

One of these fields is biomedical research. In labs across the world, you’ll find a host of different machines used to study and create biological and chemical compounds. These machines include DNA and protein synthesizers, mass spectrometers, UV spectrometers, lyophilizers, liquid chromatography machines, fraction collectors… I could go on and on.

These machines are prohibitively expensive to the DIYer. But they don’t have to be. We have the ability to make these machines in our garages if we wanted to. So why aren’t we? One of the reasons we see very few biomedical hacks is because the chemistry knowledge needed to make and operate these machines is generally not in the typical DIYers toolbox. This is something that we believe needs to change, and we start today.

In this article, we’re going to go over how to convert basic chemical formulas, such as C9H804 (aspirin), into its molecular structure, and visa versa. Such knowledge might be elementary, but it is a requirement for anyone who wishes to get started in biomedical hacking, and a great starting point for the curious among us.

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