Machine-learning Mendeleevs have rediscovered the periodic table

How are you enjoying the International Year of the Periodic Tables so far? Yes, tables – we should probably have been using the plural all along. Since Dmitri Mendeleev (and others) first sketched out the periodic relationships between the elements in the 1860s, it has been estimated that around a thousand different tables have appeared in print – and that’s before considering all those on the internet. Even the T-shirts handed out at the opening ceremony in January (I grabbed one, naturally) offered a new version, courtesy of the European Chemical Society, with the elements colour-coded and given different-sized boxes according to their abundance and availability.