Recently, a team of physicists from Russia and the United States created a never-before-seen superheavy element in the laboratory. Right now, it’s known simply as “element 117” or “ununseptium.” The experiment was led by Yuri Oganessian, a physicist at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.

Sigurd Hofmann, a nuclear physicist in Darmstadt, Germany, told Science News that the results are “convincing.”

Those names for the element are not official. A new element doesn’t receive an official name until more teams of scientists can also make it in the laboratory. This stage of the scientific process, called verification, is important to make sure that the original experiment was not a fluke. Verification can take a long time. In February of this year, for example, element 112 finally received the official name “Copernicium,” and it had been first identified in 1996.

At the center of every atom is a nucleus, and inside the nucleus are particles called neutrons and protons. Each element has a characteristic number of protons, and inside an atom of the newly created element are 117 protons, which is why it is called “element 117.”

This illustration shows the newly found element that formed when berkelium atoms were bombarded by calcium atoms. See an animation of the bombardment.

From animation by Kwei-Yu Chu/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The new element was created at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in a machine called a cyclotron. A cyclotron may sound like a roller coaster — and for atoms, it is a wild ride. A cyclotron smashes together different kinds of elements at super-high speeds, and scientists watch to see what happens just after the crash.

In this case, the scientists used a cyclotron to bombard atoms of berkelium with atoms of calcium. Specifically, an isotope, or variation, of berkelium (berkelium-249) was bombarded with an isotope of calcium, calcium-48. The calcium isotope had 28 neutrons compared with calcium’s usual 20. Add that to the usual 20 protons in calcium, and you have calcium-48.

Berkelium is a heavy element that does not occur in nature — it also had to be created in a laboratory. In fact, berkelium was created in a laboratory in Tennessee, then transported around the world to Russia for this experiment.

And what an experiment it was: For 150 days, the scientists smashed calcium-48 atoms into berkelium-249 atoms, and at the end of the experiment the team had created exactly six atoms of element 117, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where some of the other scientists on the project work. And for all that work, those six atoms didn’t last very long: After a tiny fraction of a second, they had all decayed.

A heavy atom decays when its nucleus breaks apart, and the heavy atom breaks down into smaller atoms, each having fewer protons in their nuclei than were in the original hefty atom.

It may seem like the researchers went through a lot of work for six rare atoms that quickly vanished, but the scientists are excited. They’ve been looking for element 117 for some time — both elements 116 and 118 have already been made in a laboratory, but until now no one had seen element 117.

Almost all heavy elements decay quickly, but scientists are excited because superheavy elements such as 116, 117 and 118 don’t vanish as quickly as other superheavies. Scientists have been hoping to find a group of these atoms together. Such a group would be a step toward finding an “island of stability” on the Periodic Table, and element 117 may be part of the group.

Going Deeper:

Witze, Alexandra. 2010. “Superheavy element 117 makes debut,” Science News, April 24. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57964/title/BREAKING_NEWS_Superheavy_element_117_makes_debut

Ornes, Stephen. 2010. “Heaviest named element is official,” Science News for Kids, March 15. http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57303/title/FOR_KIDS_Heaviest_named_element_is_official

Ornes, Stephen. 2008. “The particle zoo,” Science News for Kids, June 25. http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080625/Note2.asp

Witze, Alexandra. 2010. “The backstory behind a new element.” Science News, April 12. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/58239/title/Deleted_Scenes__The_backstory_behind_a_new_element

Now, there’s a new kid on the block: Elements, meet copernicium.

This element was officially named on February 19, but the element itself isn’t new. German scientists made and observed it in 1996. But in the 14 years since then, other scientists have been working to study and validate the original findings. A scientific breakthrough is “validated” when other scientists can perform the same experiment and get the same results. Validation is an important part of the scientific process because it demonstrates that a scientific discovery was not a mistake.

All that hard work finally paid off when the element finally received its name, copernicium, from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (the organization in charge of making sure chemists all over the world use the same words to mean the same things.) copernicium is named in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus, a 16th century Polish scholar who proposed that Earth orbits the sun (rather than that everything orbits Earth) and that Earth turns on its own axis. These ideas may seem obvious now, but in 16th century Europe, they were revolutionary.

The element copernicium has 112 protons and is named for the 16th century scholar Nicolaus Copernicus (pictured).

Dumelow/Wikimedia Commons

Scientists organize all the elements on a chart called the Periodic Table. Each element gets a symbol and its own number, and copernicium gets the symbol Cn and the number 112. This number means that inside every atom of copernicium are 112 protons. Protons are particles inside the nucleus, or core, of every atom. The lightest element, hydrogen, has only one proton inside each atom.

Its 112 protons make copernicium the heaviest known element with a name. It was first observed by Sigurd Hofmann, a scientist at the Center for Heavy Ion Research, or GSI, in Darmstadt, Germany. Hofmann and his team created copernicium in the laboratory when they blasted atoms of lead (each with 82 protons) with zinc isotopes, kinds of zinc atoms that each had 30 protons.

This was no easy process: You can’t just shoot one atom at another and expect the atoms to buddy up. In 1996, Hofmann and his team had to figure out a way to get all the protons together — and stick. They used a machine, called the Universal Linear Accelerator, that can accelerate atoms up to 10 percent the speed of light. After a week of working on these high-speed collisions, Hofmann’s team found copernicium — even though it quickly vanished. Most of the superheavy elements in copernicium’s neighborhood — those that are heavier than uranium — tend to be unstable, which means they decay into smaller atoms quickly.

Now, 14 years after Hofmann’s experiment, other scientists are able to make copernicium and validate Hofmann’s original work. Scientists are excited about copernicium. If such a superheavy atom can be created, then even heavier elements might be waiting in the future. “One of the exciting things is, how far can we keep going?” says nuclear chemist Paul Karol of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Going Deeper:

Ehrenberg, Rachel. “Naming an atomic heavyweight,” Science News, February 25. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56651/title/Naming_an_atomic_heavyweight

Ornes, Stephen. 2010. “The hottest soup in New York,” Science News for Kids, March 3. http://sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20100303/Note3.asp

Ornes, Stephen. 2008. “The particle zoo,” Science News for Kids, June 25. http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080625/Note2.asp

That new record is 4 trillion degrees Celsius (that’s 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit). By doing experiments at that temperature, scientists hope to study what happened just after the universe was born. Four trillion degrees Celsius is 250,000 times hotter than the hottest part of the sun, and probably close to the temperature of the universe right after the Big Bang, the birth of the universe.

The hot stuff is called a quark-gluon plasma, and scientists found it at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. Using a giant instrument called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, the scientists zoomed two gold atoms through a ring that is 2.4 miles around and smashed the atoms together — and then watched to see what came out. There was so much energy in the crash that the atoms, in a way, melted.

Shown is a snapshot from a simulation of gold atoms colliding quickly enough to create high temperatures that “melt out” the quarks and gluons within, creating a quark-gluon plasma.

Brookhaven National Laboratory

As temperatures climb, most solids melt into liquids, and then the liquids become gas. (Some solids may go straight to gas if the conditions are right.) Ice becomes liquid water at 0º Celsius (32º Fahrenheit). At 100º C (212º F), liquid water boils into water vapor. Compared to other substances, water’s melting and boiling points are mild: Tungsten, a material used in light bulbs, doesn’t melt until 3,410º C (6,800º F).

That temperature is freezing compared to 4 trillion degrees C. At that temperature, atoms can break apart — and parts inside an atom can break apart — and then the tiny particles inside those parts can break apart. Think of an atom as a set of nesting dolls. When the largest, outer doll breaks apart, there’s another, smaller doll inside. And when that doll breaks apart … surprise! There’s another doll inside.

Similarly, at the center of every atom is the nucleus. Inside the nucleus are particles called protons and neutrons. And inside protons and neutrons are even smaller particles called quarks. Quarks are held together thanks to another kind of particle called gluons. (Gluons help to “glue” the particle together.)

The hot stuff produced at Brookhaven is a quark-gluon plasma and it spills out like a soup made of quarks and gluons. The quark-gluon plasma is a new type of matter that’s unlike solid, liquid or gas — but it kind of behaves like a liquid.

“We are extremely anxious to find out how this works,” Barbara Jacak told Science News. “Why is it a liquid?”

Jacak works at Stony Brook University in New York and is one of the scientists working on the project at Brookhaven. She helped take the plasma’s temperature. That was a difficult task because it’s hard to measure things that small. The plasma only existed for about one-trillionth of a trillionth of a second, and it was tiny, about one-trillionth of a centimeter across.

It was a very small piece of space that was super hot for a very short amount of time. In other words, you can’t just put a thermometer in it, Jacak says.

To take the temperature, the researchers watched it glow. A hot iron rod changes color from red to yellow to white as it heats up. In a similar way, the colors of light coming from the plasma changed. Based on what colors of light the soup emitted, the team figured out that the substance had reached the 4-trillion-degree record.

By studying these kinds of super-hot temperatures, scientists hope to learn more about how the universe formed. The quark-gluon plasma may look a lot like the hot and heavy goo that existed in the universe right after the Big Bang.

Experiments such as those at Brookhaven may help us understand what happened at the very beginning of the universe. But there’s a lot of work to be done, says scientist Chris Quigg of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. “These are very early days,” he told Science News. “Like many good observations, this opens up many questions.”

Going Deeper:

Sanders, Laura. 2010. “Hot and heavy matter runs a 4 trillion degree fever,” Science News, February 15. http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56379/title/Hot_and_heavy_matter_runs_a_4_trillion_degree_fever
Ornes, Stephen. 2008. “The Particle Zoo,” Science News for Kids, June 25. http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080625/Note2.asp
Cowen, Ron. 2010. “New galaxies may be the farthest back in time and space yet.” Science News, January 30.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/52404/title/New-found_galaxies_may_be_farthest_back_in_time_and_space_yet

See the video and information from Brookhaven. http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/physics.asp

Don’t look now, but the future of electronics may be as close as the pencil in your hand.

Big technology comes in tiny packages. New cell phones, music players and personal computers get smaller every year, which means these electronics require even smaller components on the inside. Engineers are looking for creative ways to build these components, and they’ve turned their eyes to graphene, a superthin material that could change the future of electronics.

Graphene isn’t just small, it’s “the thinnest possible material in this world,” says Kostya Novoselov, a scientist who studies graphene at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom. He calls it a “wonder material.” It’s so thin that you would need to stack about 25,000 sheets just to make a pile as thick as a piece of ordinary white paper. If you were to hold a sheet of graphene in your fingers, you’d have no idea because you wouldn’t be able to see it.

In addition to being nearly invisible, graphene is also superstrong. In July, engineers at Columbia University in New York City showed that graphene is 200 times stronger than steel, making it the strongest known substance on the planet. Move over, Superman!

Graphene is made of carbon, one of the most abundant elements in the universe. Every known kind of life contains carbon; so do diamonds and coal. Graphene is a sheet of carbon, but only one atom thick. (An atom is the smallest possible piece of an element. If you change an atom of carbon, then it’s not carbon anymore.) You don’t have to look far to find graphene — it’s all around you. You can even try to find some right now.

This is the famous Hope Diamond, housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Both diamonds and graphene are made of carbon.

The Smithsonian Institution

Do-it-yourself graphene

If you want a sneak peek of this high-tech wonderstuff, all you need is a pencil, paper and a little adhesive tape. Use the pencil to shade a small area on the paper, and then apply a small piece of adhesive tape over the area. When you pull up the tape, you’ll see that it pulls up a thin layer of some of the shading from your pencil. That layer is called graphite, one of the softest minerals in the world. When you write with a pencil, you’re actually leaving a trail of graphite on the paper.

Now stick the same piece of tape on another sheet of paper and pull the tape up — there should be an even thinner layer, this time left on the paper. Now imagine that you do this over and over, until you get the thinnest possible layer of material on the paper. This layer would be only one atom thick, and you wouldn’t be able to see it. Graphite is made of layers of graphene, so when you get to the thinnest possible layer, you’ve found graphene.

In 2004, scientists used a form of this method (in the laboratory) to isolate graphene for the first time. Those scientists included Novoselov and his Manchester colleague, Andre Geim. Their success was a huge surprise to the scientific community. Researchers had thought about graphene for a long time, but “for years, it was thought that graphene couldn’t exist,” says Jonathan Coleman, a physicist at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland.

Since then, scientists like Coleman have been looking for new ways to make and use graphene.

Graphite, shown here, is also made of carbon atoms. It’s one of the softest minerals in the world and is used to make tennis rackets, batteries and the “lead” in your pencil.

U.S. House of Representatives

A graphene future

Once scientists can make large amounts of graphene, it could show up in a wide range of applications. Take newspapers, for example. In the next decade or so, says Coleman, newspapers probably won’t be printed on regular paper. Instead, newspaper stories could be displayed on a kind of superthin electric paper, like a computer screen that you can carry around with you. But unlike a computer screen, this electronic paper will be durable and flexible. “You’ll be able to roll it up and fold it and put it in your back pocket,” he says. “It will be flexible and fantastic.”

Because it is strong, thin, transparent and can conduct electricity, graphene is a great candidate for this kind of device. Geim, one of the scientists who first isolated graphene, says graphene could also be used in the production of solar cells, which need materials that can both conduct electricity and let light through.

Graphene might also play a role in the future of cell phones, personal music players or even personal computers. Inside these devices are millions of transistors, tiny electrical switches that control the flow of electricity. Working together, transistors act like the “brain” of a device. The more transistors you have, the faster your computer. As computers get faster and more complicated, scientists are looking for new ways to build smaller transistors. Most transistors are made from silicon.

In early 2008, Novoselov led a team of scientists to build the world’s smallest transistor. It was made of graphene and measured only about 10 atoms across and 1 atom thick. In the laboratory, the scientists showed that the graphene transistor was faster than a silicon transistor. But there’s an interesting problem — graphene transistors are too small to be useful in everyday use! It may be years before computers can use these tiny graphene transistors, Novoselov says, but that day is coming. The future looks bright.

“The beauty of transistors made of graphene is that they can be made very small,” he says. “They will be very fast, and we are searching for ways to make them work even faster.”

The carbon atoms that make up graphene stick together like a web made of hexagons (six-sided shapes).

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

“Magic liquids” and the bumpy road ahead

Research into graphene is still in the early stages, so it could be years before we use any devices with the wonder material inside. One of the biggest problems right now is how to make large amounts of graphene. Unfortunately, you can’t buy graphene at your local hardware store. And even if you could, it comes with a hefty price tag. Superstrong and superthin, graphene is also superexpensive.

“In terms of mass, it’s the most expensive material known to man,” says Coleman. To buy an amount of graphene equal to one teeny-tiny slice of one human hair would cost you more than $1,500. “The United States as a country can afford to buy only about a milligram of graphene per year,” says Novoselov.

In August, Coleman and his team announced they had come up with a solution. They engineered an experiment where they mixed a special liquid with graphite. After they shook the mixture, they noticed that big flakes of graphene started peeling away from the graphite — and sticking to the liquid! Coleman calls such substances “magic liquids,” and so far his team has found ten different kinds. Scientists can use these liquids as an inexpensive way to produce large sheets of graphene.

There’s still a lot of work to do, he says, but “we’ve pointed the direction to where this is going.”

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This delicate, crystallized gold specimen was found in Leadville, Colorado.

© Denis Finnin/AMNH

Gold is a metal. It conducts electricity, and it can be shaped into sheets, long wires, or rings. Gold is an element—a substance made of one kind of atom. As an element, gold has its own square on the periodic table of chemical elements.

Gold also represents beauty and value, and it has done so for thousands of years. It’s part of our culture and history.

Why do we value gold so much? It has a distinctive color. No other metal is a shiny yellow. It’s also quite rare.

And this metal has other unique properties that help it keep its shine, as I learned on a recent trip to the new gold exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Keeping its luster

The glitter of a gold nugget or flake immediately catches the eye. But gold’s shine, unlike that of metals such as iron, copper, or silver, is practically permanent.

For example, copper metal has a reddish color. But copper objects turn green when they react with oxygen in the air. This coating on a copper surface, called a patina, gives the Statue of Liberty her distinctive green color.

The Statue of Liberty has a greenish color because the copper metal from which it was made combined with oxygen in the air.

Photo by I. Peterson.

In contrast, gold resists corrosion. It doesn’t react with chemicals in the air or elsewhere in the environment. So it doesn’t turn green as copper does, rust the way iron does, or tarnish the way silver does.

Shaping a nugget

Gold is also a soft metal that’s easy to shape. People have been working with it for thousands of years.

Gold artifacts are among the oldest [human-made objects] that we know, says Jim Webster. He helped create the gold exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History and studies earth and planetary sciences at the museum.

Unlike many other metals, gold can be found on the ground in its pure form. Instead of having to go through many steps to isolate a metal from rock, early people could have used gold nuggets that were just lying around.

“Literally, now or 6,000 years ago, one could have picked up [a nugget] and just started hammering on it,” says Webster. Ancient people shaped gold into jewelry, statues, coins, and other beautiful objects.

Jewelry made in the shape of animals, like these gold earrings, was popular more than 2,300 years ago in ancient Greece.

© Craig Chesek/AMNH

The property that allows gold to be shaped easily is called malleability. Gold can be hammered into very thin sheets without breaking.

Experts can make a thin sheet measuring up to 100 square feet in area from just 1 ounce of gold, Webster says.

The museum’s gold exhibit features a small room whose walls and ceilings are covered with gold—a layer just 0.18 micron thick. That’s a tiny fraction of the width of a pencil point.

Sarah Webb stands in the gold room at the American Museum of Natural History. The walls and ceiling are coated with a layer of gold only 0.18 micron thick.

Photo by Anne Sasso.

Because gold is so soft, jewelers and other users often combine it with other metals to make it stronger. The purity of gold is measured in karats, and pure gold is 24 karats. Jewelry in the United States is often 14 karats, or about 60 percent gold, combined with other metals, such as silver or copper.

Rare metal

Even though gold has many special properties, the main reason for its value is its rarity.

Researchers estimate that the total amount of gold ever mined would fit into 60 tractor trailers, Webster says. This might seem like a lot—until you compare it with iron. Iron mining and smelting companies produce six times that amount every year.

Because of its value, people have made coins out of gold, and banks store gold in the form of bars. Some people collect gold coins or trade gold in international markets. Its current value is more than $600 per ounce.

Banks and gold markets can use gold bars for transactions. This bar weighs about 27 pounds and is roughly 6 inches long, 3 inches wide, and 2 inches thick. At current prices, it’s worth more than a quarter of a million dollars.

© C. Chesek/AMNH, Courtesy of Johnson Matthey, Inc.

Electronic gold

Most gold that’s mined today still goes into making jewelry. You also see it in Olympic medals and many other special awards, including the Oscar statuettes that honor movies.

But modern electronics and the journey into space have helped give gold an important place in the technology that we use every day.

Audio and video cables often have gold-coated plugs for two reasons. Gold conducts electricity better than all but two other metals, Webster says. And because gold doesn’t corrode, the surface on the plug stays clean.

For the same reasons, computer chips also often contain gold, as do a variety of other electronic components.

We’ve also launched gold into space.

A thin layer of gold covered the visor on the helmet of an astronaut on the moon. The gold layer is transparent but still keeps out the sun’s heat.

NASA

Gold reflects heat better than any other metal. The visor on an astronaut’s helmet has an ultrathin layer of gold. The layer is thin enough to be transparent, so the astronaut can still see through it. But this thin layer reflects the sun’s heat away from the astronaut.

The museum’s gold exhibit includes a helmet from the Apollo 11 mission, when astronauts first landed on the moon in 1969.

Even after thousands of years, gold remains a precious metal—one that has long been prized for its glitter and is now more useful than ever.

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For many people in the United States, the Fourth of July means one thing: Fireworks. And they’re not alone.

Independence Day fireworks at Riverside Park in Yankton, Missouri.

National Park Service photo by Linda Gordon Rokosz

“Every country, it seems, has a fireworks day,” says John Conkling. He’s a chemist and fireworks researcher at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. “People universally seem to get a deep satisfaction from watching fireworks,” he says.

Viewer satisfaction demands serious science. All year long, researchers such as Conkling mix and burn chemicals in the lab to see what kinds of flames they can create. Now, with advances in technology and chemistry, holiday celebrations are more dazzling and colorful than ever.

People have been watching fireworks for more than 2,000 years. “There has been a really dramatic change in the appearance of fireworks,” Conkling says, “from merely being devices that go up into the air and explode to the dramatic color displays we have today.”

Gunpowder blasts

At its core, a firework contains a mixture of chemicals that burn well. These mixtures are produced in the form of gumball-sized pellets, which are held inside a cylindrical shell, or cartridge. Gunpowder at the bottom of the cartridge launches and ignites the firework. A special fuse delays the explosion until the cartridge is airborne.

Every type of firework is designed to burn for a certain amount of time in particular colors and patterns. The presence of different chemicals produces different colors.

Fireworks at Mount Rushmore National Monument in South Dakota.

National Park Service

Sodium compounds, for instance, produce a yellow flame when burned. Barium nitrate burns green, and magnesium and aluminum burn white.

If Conkling wants to make violet, he has to mix a red-producing chemical, such as strontium nitrate, with blue-producing copper salts. The more strontium nitrate and less copper that he uses, the redder the final shade will be.

“There’s really no color that you can’t make,” Conkling says.

Bursting suns

When Conkling develops fireworks, he starts with what he already knows about how particular chemicals burn. Then, he puts materials together in his lab and ignites them under a ventilated hood. He alters proportions through a process of trial and error to get the result that he wants.

Fireworks display on July 3, 2003, at the Cowpens National Battlefield in South Carolina.

National Park Service

Certain chemicals, combinations of chemicals, and packaging strategies produce special effects. Fireworks that burn slowly, for example, leave trails behind them and look like strings of colored spaghetti. Quick burners look like bursting suns.

Some ingredients produce streaks of light that dart around like grasshoppers trapped in a jar. If materials are pressed tightly in a tube, blowing them up makes loud whistling noises. The addition of a type of chemical known as a perchlorate makes a big, loud boom.

“The sky’s the limit, so to speak,” Conkling says. “Imagination is the only limiting factor.”

When lab tests are complete, companies make pellets of the new mixtures to try them outdoors before manufacturing them in large numbers.

Electronic control

One of the newest trends in fireworks, Conkling says, is the use of patterns. By arranging pellets in a flat layer inside the cartridge, researchers have figured out how to make fireworks that explode in the shape of hearts, Olympic rings, and other objects.

4th of July fireworks at Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Commander John Bortniak, NOAA Corps (ret.)

However, the shapes are clearly visible only from certain angles. “The biggest challenge is to get them oriented,” Conkling says.

The only solution at this point is to launch three or four of each shape at a time. “When they burst, one is usually quite apparent to people on the ground,” Conkling says. “People in other locations might see another one better.”

Fireworks experts have also moved into the computer age. Instead of lighting fireworks by hand, which is dangerous, major shows now rely on electronic devices and cables to control the timing of the launches.

Computer programs also allow choreographers to set off explosions that match music playing in the background. Such touches are always big crowd-pleasers.

Studying fire

The more you learn about fireworks, the more you might appreciate the Fourth of July and other celebrations with the eye of a scientist.

Fireworks at the National Mall, with a view across the Potomac River toward the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

National Park Service

“I’m sure I view presentations quite a bit differently than many people,” Conkling says. “I try to analyze everything. I love when I see something that I haven’t seen before. Then, I try to figure out how they did that particular effect.”

Even just studying fire and explosions can be exciting, Conkling adds. It’s a great area to work in, he says. “I get a bang out of it.”

For safety’s sake, it’s best to avoid experimenting with any type of flame or explosive chemical unless you’re working alongside a trained professional. Lots of people end up in the emergency room every year with severe burns after launching their own explosives.

Instead, if you watch a fireworks show this year, try to focus on what you see and hear. After all, every bang, sparkle, burst, and boom is an amazing example of chemistry in action.

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