It is not a news agency, although it is known as Efe. The number 9 of the periodic table is the smallest of the family of halogens (yes, those same gases that filled light bulbs), so called because of their extraordinary ability to form salts (halos in Greek). Fluorine was first found in 1670 by the German glassmaker Henry Schwandhard when he worked with a colorful mineral called fluorite.

In 2005, then-president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, delivered a speech that caused a great stir among the scientific community: he claimed that gender inequality in science was not due to discrimination, but was the direct result of a genetic differentiation that made women less suitable for scientific research. Again, last October, CERN's Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia defended the inexistence of such discrimination during a conference on equal opportunities in science and went so far as to suggest that women sometimes receive preferential treatment as a result of gender policies.

Today, 185 years ago, Dmitri Mendeleyev was born, known primarily for having the clear vision of grouping chemical elements according to their atomic weight and properties, and elaborating the first version of the Periodic Table, formed at that time by 63 elements. However, his genius lies not only in this idea but also in many other things such as his intuition, since he predicted that there were missing elements to be discovered and he left some gaps in it to introduce them in the future by predicting the properties they should have.