Psychology & Psychiatry

Troubling rise in suicides linked with common food preservative

A recent increase in fatal sodium nitrite poisonings has some health experts calling for stricter regulation of the substance. Sodium nitrite is a white salt commonly used in curing meat. But in recent years, it's also being ...

Cardiology

Six things that raise your blood pressure

Keeping your pressure under control can mean adding things to your life, like exercise, that help lower it. But, you may not realize that it also means avoiding things that raise your pressure. A healthy blood pressure level ...

Immunology

Salt could be a key factor in allergic immune reactions

Salt apparently affects allergic immune reactions. A team working with Prof. Christina Zielinski at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has demonstrated in cell cultures that salt leads to the formation of Th2 cells. ...

Health

The chemistry of salt in the kitchen

When we say "salt", we usually mean the stuff we sprinkle on our chips, which is sodium chloride (NaCl). But, technically speaking, this is just one example of a salt.

Health

Salt intake physiologically set in humans, new study finds

(Medical Xpress)—Don't toss your saltshaker out just yet. A new study led by scientists affiliated with the University of California, Davis, adds further credence to the notion that concern about the amount of salt you ...

page 1 from 40

Sodium

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.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA