New ordering of elements could help find materials with promising properties

The periodic table may be the most iconic way of ordering the elements, but it is not necessarily the most useful. Elements may sit side by side that have little chemical similarity, and even the columns don’t always reflect the closest affinities – carbon and lead, for instance. Two scientists in Moscow now propose a new way of arranging the elements in a single linear sequence with the smallest change in properties between each successive pair.¹ Using this scheme, they say it will be possible to predict which simple compounds will have similar characteristics, helping to identify new candidate materials with useful properties such as hardness or magnetic behaviour.