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Ram Mohan looks at how bismuth — a remarkably harmless element among the toxic heavy metals in the periodic table — has sparked interest in areas varying from medicinal to industrial chemistry.

Whether bismuth is part of a class of materials highly suitable for quantum computing and spintronics was a long‑standing issue. Kobe University research has now revealed that the true nature of ...

At that time, the Inca Empire was expanding, and the Inca began to use bismuth deposits to make a new type of bronze alloy. Archaeologists have found artifacts made of this bismuth bronze at the ...

Pepto-Bismol is a fascinating exception, both because its active ingredient is bismuth, a heavy metal commonly used in shotgun pellets, and because there is a lot of it in each dose. So much ...

But why is bismuth so strongly repelled from magnets?. According to Eric Riesel, a magnetic materials chemist at MIT, the answer comes down to the type of magnetism exhibited by bismuth.Every ...

Deceptive appearance: While bismuth appears to be topological at the surface, this masks the fact that the bulk material is not topological. (Courtesy: Yuki Fuseya) Bismuth has puzzled scientists for ...