NEW YORK TIMES: Is It Time to Upend the Periodic Table?

Description

When Sir Martyn Poliakoff, a chemist at the University of Nottingham, heard about a game called Periodic Table Battleship, he couldn’t help but imagine a player’s perspective of the opponent’s inverted fleet of elements.

This catalyzed a mad idea. In May — coinciding with Unesco’s International Year of the Periodic Table, which marks its 150th anniversary — Sir Martyn and collaborators, including his daughter, Ellen Poliakoff, an experimental psychologist at the University of Manchester, published a paper with a recommendation: “Turning the Periodic Table Upside Down.”