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These elements originally referred to earth, water, air and fire rather than the chemical elements of modern science. The term 'elements' (stoicheia) was first used by Greek philosopher Plato around 360 BCE in his dialogue Timaeus, which includes a discussion of the composition of inorganic and organic bodies and is a speculative treatise on ...
The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the elements, is an ordered arrangement of the chemical elements into rows ("periods") and columns ("groups"). It is an icon of chemistry and is widely used in physics and other sciences.
A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...
Classical elements, ancient beliefs about the fundamental types of matter (earth, air, fire, water); The elements, a religious term referring to the bread and wine of the Eucharist
Modern science does not support the classical elements to classify types of substances. Atomic theory classifies atoms into more than a hundred chemical elements such as oxygen , iron , and mercury , which may form chemical compounds and mixtures .
In the periodic table of the elements, each numbered row is a period. A period on the periodic table is a row of chemical elements. All elements in a row have the same number of electron shells. Each next element in a period has one more proton and is less metallic than its predecessor.
Selenium, which is an essential element for animals and prokaryotes and is a beneficial element for many plants, is the least-common of all the elements essential to life. [ 3 ] [ 63 ] Selenium acts as the catalytic center of several antioxidant enzymes, such as glutathione peroxidase , [ 11 ] and plays a wide variety of other biological roles .
Element symbols for chemical elements, also known as atomic symbols, normally consist of one or two letters from the Latin alphabet and are written with the first ...