Sodium chloride, one of humankind’s most familiar crystals. It has something of a bad name, being implicated in high blood pressure, but is also essential to animal life. I have used the crystalline structure of sodium chloride to represent sodium as it is the sodium ions that allow our bodies to generate nerve impulses and to maintain water and electrolyte balance.
The cubic structures of table salt crystals result from their atomic arrangement where each positively charged sodium ion is surrounded by six negatively charged chloride ions, and vice versa, as shown in the diagram.
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