What elements are on your bucket list?
Why chemists want to work with everything on the periodic table
Bill Gates has a copy of the periodic table in his office. It’s a little more than that, though – it’s a collection of samples from as many elements as he can gather (you can buy your own for a mere £40,000). Of course, radioactivity means Gates can only go so far, and for the transactinides he has to make do with little pictures of their namesakes. I can go one better: I’ve got a periodic table signed by a member of every lab where one of those superheavy elements was discovered. My collection includes scientists from across North America, Europe and Asia, including the team leads for element 107 onwards. Take that, Gates.