Let's hear it for Dmitri Mendeleev. His periodic table has done a remarkable job of making sense of the elements, arranging them neatly into families whose members share similar properties. For more than a century it has been chemists' guiding light. But Mendeleev's classic layout is starting to prove inadequate at describing the unexpected ways in which chemical elements behave when divvied up into small chunks. And now some chemists think it may be time to build a whole new table, this time from something much stranger than atoms: superatoms. According to Mendeleev's roll call, an element's chemistry can be deduced from where it sits in the periodic table. Reactive metals like sodium and calcium occupy the two columns on the left. The inert "noble" gases make up the column on the far right, flanked by typical non-metals such as chlorine and sulphur.
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