Guanajuato, Gto., January 21, 2019.- Every time we go to a stationery and buy a periodic table of the chemical elements it is as if we were to bring the universe in a piece of paper. The periodic table tells us what the universe is made of and the composition of all the matter we know.

United Nations (UN) declared 2019 as the International year of the periodic table due to the commemoration of the 150 years of its discovery by the Russian scientist Dimitri Mendeléiev, on the matter, the professor-researcher of the Department of Chemistry, Dr. José Eduardo Báez García talked about the importance of this fact.

In principle he mentioned that before the discovery of the periodic table there was Alchemy that consisted of a series of hermetic knowledge that sought the transmutation of the elements. "The Alchemists met with interesting surprises such as distillation and other methods of separation, they also discovered some compounds and named some elements with certain symbology, each alchemist generated his own symbols. There was No consensus to name the elements because of the censorship of the church at that time. The alchemists were airtight and lived in basements. "

In the nineteenth century there was more openness and the chemist Dimitri Mendeleev presented his system of ordering the elements in the year of 1869. "The Russian scientist showed a table with 62 chemical elements and was ordered based on the atomic weights. The current periodic table is ordered from the atomic number, that is, the number of protons," said the researcher at the University of Guanajuato.

"Mendeleev was a teacher and wanted to systematize the disposition of the elements for his students, he was ordering them and that allowed him to predict others that had not been discovered," he said. Currently, 118 chemical elements have been discovered. The last four are Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson.

Dr. Báez García mentioned that "most of the elements of the table are not produced by humans, these were derived or synthesized in explosions of stars like supernovae and of these powders after the explosion, composed of different elements, they formed little by little the planets. Only synthetic elements such as the 118 (Oganesson) which is unstable and decomposes in a short period of time have been obtained or produced in laboratories. "

Mexico and the periodic table
The professor at the University of Guanajuato indicated that Mexico has two significant chemical elements. Mexico is the number one silver exporter worldwide, an element of the periodic table that has many applications in the financial and chemical aspects.

"Another element that is very important in the periodic table and also in Mexico is the bismuth that is used for pharmaceutical products such as bismuth subsalicylate, a medicine used for the treatment of indigestion and upset stomach."

To commemorate the 150 years of the discovery of the periodic table, in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Guanajuato there will be various activities such as conferences, seminars and dissemination talks.

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