The Table
Meet all 118 and colour them by any property you like: weight, heat, size, how common they are.
Field guide to matter at its limits
Extreme Matter Atlas
Everything you have ever held is built from the same short list of ingredients: 118 elements, and only 94 of them turn up in nature. Some of them are show-offs. One is so heavy a soft drink can of it would be a struggle to lift. One stays liquid at ordinary air pressure however cold the room gets, and turns solid only if you squeeze it to about 25 times that pressure as well. One holds onto its electrons so tightly that almost nothing can talk it out of them.
Pick a door and go looking. There is no right order.
The whole shelf, on one chart
Every element in its seat, coloured by family. Tap a box and its card opens right here: what it weighs, the heat it takes to melt it, how much of the ground is made of it, and any record it holds.
Click or tap a box for its card. Arrow keys walk the chart, Enter opens a card, Escape closes it. On a narrow screen the chart slides sideways inside its own frame.
Over on the full chart you can recolour the boxes by density, melting point, atom size or how common a thing is, search for an element by name or number, and light up the ones holding a record.
118
Confirmed so far. The last four were named in 2016, and the search for 119 and 120 is running now.
94
Turn up in nature. The rest are made in labs, and most vanish in moments.
2.2 million
New crystal recipes a computer model put forward in 2023. Predictions, not finished materials: close to one for every person in Perth, a city that passed 2.4 million in 2025.
17 days
A robot lab took that long to cook 41 recipes it had never made before.
Choose your door
Eighteen ways in, grouped by subject. Plenty of what sits on the shelf now arrived as somebody's wild idea first, so everything shares the same drawers.
Elements
The shelf everything is built from, and the pieces still being worked out.
Records
The heaviest, hottest, rarest and strangest, with numbers you can picture.
Claimed Elements
Every element named in a strange story, and what it actually does when you measure it.
Beyond the Table
Squeeze sodium and it turns see-through. The chart is a map of one set of conditions.
Patterns
Structure, vibration, responsive matter and the shapes waves leave behind.
Crystal Lab
Sketch a flat pattern, stack it, twist it, break it on purpose, and watch it vibrate.
Metamaterials
Shapes that change what a material does without changing the ingredients.
Anomalous Metamaterials
Build crystal lattices and 2D stacks for adaptive skins, alien craft and pre-Younger Dryas engineering.
Cymatics
Drive a plate with a note and watch sand find the places that hold still.
Resonance
One idea from a playground swing to a hospital scanner to a single atom.
Engines
Ways of moving, from old stories to open physics.
Vimana
Old sky-craft stories read as a design brief, on a bench that does the sums.
Red Mercury
Mercury engines from the old texts, and the mercury ion drives that really flew.
Element 115
Moscovium, the island of stability, and what bending gravity would actually cost.
Zero Point
Empty space pushes on two mirrors, and it has been measured. Now what?
Out of Phase
Two waves in the same place can cancel to nothing. Matter travels as waves too.
Tesla, Recalculated
He published the numbers. Here they are, run again from first principles.
Making
Finding new materials and building with them.
GNoME
The model that predicted millions of new crystals, and the robot kitchen cooking them.
Engineering
Records put to work: your phone screen, a hospital scanner, a jet engine, a deep-sea sub.
Sci-Fi Lab
Warp drives, tractor beams and replicators, each given a spec sheet and a real nearest thing.
Frontiers
Where the search could head next, and what it would change at your place.
Why the extremes matter
A record is not a trophy. It is a door to a job nothing ordinary can do. The metal with the highest melting point is the one you line a fusion reactor with. The metal that carries electricity best is the one you would wire a city with, if it were not so dear. The element that pulls hardest on shared electrons is the reason a non-stick pan shrugs off a fried egg.
Push any property to its limit and you find an engineer waiting there with a problem that needs exactly that.
Every record has a use
Hardest, lightest, hottest, coldest, most conductive, most magnetic, most reflective, most catalytic, longest-lived: every property has an end, and something at that end is already load-bearing in what you own or what keeps you alive.
The shelf is still growing
Teams in Japan, Russia and the United States are firing beams at targets right now, going after elements 119 and 120. Meanwhile the room to move is enormous in how the known ones are arranged.
The search got faster
For most of history, new materials came from slow cooking and luck. Pattern-finding software changed the pace, and the results are free to browse.