Periodic table of elements gets digital upgrade
New online learning tool underlines importance of isotopes in chemistry
Just knowing the periodic table of elements isn’t enough for chemistry students these days — understanding isotopes is what really matters.
Undergraduate students at The King’s University in Edmonton have designed a new electronic version of one of science’s most iconic visualizations that adds an interactive isotope component to give a new insight into each atom.
Creators of the project, called Isotopes Matter, said it has created plenty of buzz within the worlds of science and education.
It could mean the days of the multi-coloured chart hanging on the back wall of science classrooms in Alberta may be numbered.
“The scientific community has always known the importance of isotopes, but we haven’t really ever had a systematic effort to try to communicate the importance of this to the general public,” says King ’s professor of chemistry Peter Mahaffy. Now they do.
As a refresher, atoms that have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons are called isotopes. This is key because the difference in neutrons changes the mass of an atom and so they each have slight variations in their physical and chemical behaviour.
Most atoms have one or more isotopes and being able to measure subtle differences in isotopic ratios has wide-ranging scientific applications in everything from understanding climate change to crime scene investigation and catching sports drug cheats.
For example, scientists used isotopes to prove disgraced 2006 Tour de France cyclist Floyd Landis was using synthesized testosterone.
Landis claimed his body was producing more testosterone than a normal person, but chemists were able to look at testosterone molecules in his body and detect an unusual ratio of carbon isotopes that revealed he was, in fact, doping.
The subtle variation of the ratios of element isotopes can also be used to pinpoint where a sample was taken, be it Canada or Mars.
A global team of scientists with the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 2007 started the painstaking process of pulling thousands of isotope references from scientific literature to help create a definitive, reliable and authoritative isotope resource.
One of IUPAC’s mandates is to make science more accessible and to disseminate interesting and important things about chemistry to the world.
Meanwhile, the small team at King’s Centre for Visualization in Science — under the watchful eye of Mahaffey and King’s colleague, professor of mathematics and physics, Brian Martin — were developing interactive templates and electronic learning tools to help teachers explain the importance of isotopes.
Martin said part of the project was also to create an extensive list of questions that walks students through understanding isotopes and to how use isotopic ratios.
“What this project has been trying to do is to capture (isotope) subtleties and how it manifests itself in the periodic table,” Martin said.
“The response has been excitement, fear, loathing by some who think the periodic table was finished 100 years ago and it shouldn’t be touched.”
Martin added that the project helped modernize the periodic table to better reflect things such as improvements in technologies to determine different mixtures of isotopes like mass spectrometry.
“To come to the point that it has been released and so enthusiastically taken up by people from around the world, it’s really exciting and encouraging,” Mahaffey said.