An international team led by Empa and ETH Zurich researchers is playing with shape-engineered nanoscale building blocks that are up to 100-times larger than atoms and ions. And although these nano "Lego bricks" interact with ...
Materials Science
May 27, 2021
1
24
About a quarter of a percent of the entire gross domestic product of industrialized countries is estimated to be lost through a single technical issue: the fouling of heat exchanger surfaces by salts and other dissolved minerals. ...
Materials Science
Apr 28, 2021
5
1106
The EU will be home to 30 million electric cars by 2030 and the European Commission is preparing tough targets for recycling these and other batteries. Yet the impacts of battery recycling, especially for the sizeable lithium-ion ...
Environment
Mar 31, 2021
0
12
The transmembrane protein 206 abbreviated as TMEM206 is an evolutionarily conserved chloride channel that underlies the ubiquitously expressed, proton-activated, outwardly rectifying anion currents. In a new report now published ...
Synthesizing pharmaceuticals for cancer, viral diseases, and other medical conditions is slow work. A particularly challenging chemical transformation is to start with what's known as an unactivated alkene—a common molecular ...
Materials Science
Mar 16, 2021
0
71
The cell membranes of all organisms contain ion channels that permit ions to pass into or out of the cell, and these channels play extremely important roles in fundamental physiological processes such as heartbeats and the ...
Biotechnology
Mar 01, 2021
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1367
Plastics are among the most successful materials of modern times. However, they also create a huge waste problem. Scientists from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and the East China University of Science and ...
Materials Science
Feb 04, 2021
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359
In a new article published in the scientific journal Communications Chemistry, a research group at Uppsala University show, using computer simulations, that ions do not always behave as expected. In their research on molten ...
Materials Science
Jan 27, 2021
1
8
ANSTO contributed to a large international collaboration on advanced sodium ion batteries led by French researchers, which provides a direction for the design of high-performing sodium ion electrodes. Advanced sodium ion ...
Materials Science
Jan 13, 2021
1
9
The weathering of rocks at the Earth's surface may remove less greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than previous estimates, says new research from the University of Cambridge.
Earth Sciences
Dec 21, 2020
2
205
Sodium (pronounced /ˈsoʊdiəm/) is a metallic element with a symbol Na (from Latin natrium or Arabic natrun) and atomic number 11. It is a soft, silvery-white, highly reactive metal and is a member of the alkali metals within "group 1" (formerly known as ‘group IA’). It has only one stable isotope, 23Na.
Elemental sodium was first isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1806 by passing an electric current through molten sodium hydroxide. Elemental sodium does not occur naturally on Earth, but quickly oxidizes in air and is violently reactive with water, so it must be stored in an inert medium, such as a liquid hydrocarbon. The free metal is used for some chemical synthesis and heat transfer applications.
Sodium ion is soluble in water in nearly all of its compounds, and is thus present in great quantities in the Earth's oceans and other stagnant bodies of water. In these bodies it is mostly counterbalanced by the chloride ion, causing evaporated ocean water solids to consist mostly of sodium chloride, or common table salt. Sodium ion is also a component of many minerals.
Sodium is an essential element for all animal life and for some plant species. In animals, sodium ions are used in opposition to potassium ions, to allow the organism to build up an electrostatic charge on cell membranes, and thus allow transmission of nerve impulses when the charge is allowed to dissipate by a moving wave of voltage change. Sodium is thus classified as a “dietary inorganic macro-mineral” for animals. Sodium's relative rarity on land is due to its solubility in water, thus causing it to be leached into bodies of long-standing water by rainfall. Such is its relatively large requirement in animals, in contrast to its relative scarcity in many inland soils, that herbivorous land animals have developed a special taste receptor for sodium ion.
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