Tear down your wall-charts and burn your chemistry textbooks. The scientist's holy bible is getting a historic revamp as ten elements on the periodic table are about to be altered.
For more than a century, since the table's creation in 1869, each element has used a standard, single digit for its atomic weight. But as technology has improved, chemists have discovered that these numbers are not as static as we've previously thought.
So whereas Sulfur will usually be listed as having a standard atomic weight of 32.065 on the inside flap of your textbook, it's actual atomic weight can be anywhere between 32.059 and 32.076, depending on the source of the element.
To that end, ten elements -- namely hydrogen, lithium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, chlorine and thallium -- will have their atomic weights expressed as a range of numbers with upper and lower bounds, rather than a single universal weight.
It's not just for scientific pedantry, or making academic life that tiny bit harder. The tiniest variation of an element's atomic weight is important for research in a number of everyday industries. Take sports, where the atomic weight of carbon in a performance-enhancing drug is lower than the weight of carbon in the body's natural testosterone. Or food, where the precise measurement of carbon can determine the purity and source of foods like vanilla and honey.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which deals with scientific jargon and standardised measurements, will be updating the standard periodic table in 2011, which has been declared by the UN as the "International Year of Chemistry".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
