Eric Scerri is a historian and philosopher of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA. Such has been the scientific and cultural impact of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic ...

Atomic orbitals exist, sort of. The lobes, spheres, and donuts familiar to many chemists are like a map of where you might find electrons around a nucleus. The geometric patterns and motifs that atoms ...

A new machine learning algorithm could probe the quantum behavior of molecules, giving chemists a better ability to design new compounds from scratch. The AI system, with the ridiculous-sounding name ...