The new frontier of chemistry. If you remember your high school chemistry, you'll know that helium is a bit of an oddball. This noble gas is the least reactive element on the periodic table, and thanks to its full outer shell, conventional wisdom states that helium cannot interact with other atoms to create stable compounds. While other noble gas elements have shown signs of forming compounds under extreme pressure, helium has remained firmly exclusive - until now. Scientists report creating what appears to be a stable helium-sodium compound, and it challenges some of the most basic assumptions of modern chemistry. "Chemistry changes when you apply high pressure, and this can be achieved inside our Earth and on different planets like Saturn," one of the team, Ivan Popov from Utah State University, told Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo. "But this is a book changer." If you need a bit of a refresher on your chemistry facts, helium is the seco...
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