A new study at the University of Georgia has found a way to attack cancer cells that is potentially less harmful to the patient. Sodium chloride nanoparticles—more commonly known as salt—are toxic to cancer cells and ...
Bio & Medicine
Jan 08, 2020
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329
Cows can adapt themselves to a fluctuating sodium content in their feed. How they do that was so far a secret. Researchers from Goethe University have now discovered a bacterium in the microbiome of the rumen which has a ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jan 06, 2020
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65
Argonne team develops a powerful technique for probing in three dimensions the crystalline structure of cathode materials at the nanoscale.
Materials Science
Oct 21, 2019
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21
Sometimes a molecule can only undergo a particular chemical reaction if it forms a so-called host-guest complex together with another molecule—the two molecules are then bound together not by covalent bonds but by intermolecular ...
Materials Science
Oct 17, 2019
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12
A monarch butterfly had just emerged from its chrysalis when Emilie Snell-Rood reached into its cage, grabbed it carefully to take measurements and photographs, then placed it inside a tall and breezy tent. There it would ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 03, 2019
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30
A rocky extrasolar moon (exomoon) with bubbling lava may orbit a planet 550 light-years away from us. This is suggested by an international team of researchers led by the University of Bern on the basis of theoretical predictions ...
Astronomy
Aug 29, 2019
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360
Batteries power our lives: we rely on them to keep our cell phones and laptops buzzing and our hybrid and electric cars on the road. But ever-increasing adoption of the most commonly used lithium-ion batteries may actually ...
Materials Science
Jul 17, 2019
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24
A new study from UC San Francisco suggests that a protein found in the common bullfrog may one day be used to detect and neutralize a poisonous compound produced by red tides and other harmful algal blooms. The discovery ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 19, 2019
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27
Europa, a frozen moon around Jupiter, is believed to be one of the most habitable worlds in the solar system. It was first imaged in detail by the Voyager 1 probe in 1979, revealing a surface almost devoid of large craters. ...
Space Exploration
Jun 14, 2019
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45
A familiar ingredient has been hiding in plain sight on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. Using a visible light spectral analysis, planetary scientists at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages ...
Space Exploration
Jun 12, 2019
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766
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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