Periodic Coffee Table

This handsome Periodic Coffee Table contains samples of all stable elements. The radioactive elements are not included. Boo. Brownlee has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Periodic Coffee Table (BB Gadgets)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Beanolini

Similar to the hand-made wooden periodic table that won an Ig Nobel prize a few years ago.
HarveyBoing

“…of all stable elements, save the radioactive ones.”

Are there any stable elements that are radioactive? I thought the two were mutually exclusive.
Jake0748

I don’t know if this is what they meant, but there are a lot of non-radioactive elements which are very unstable chemically.
David Pescovitz

Sorry, I updated with clearer language.
Spod Slugman

HARVEYBOING, you are correct; if an isotope is stable, it is not radioactive. The instability leads to decay which emits radiation.
I can’t tell from the picture, but it looks like the table has some of the higher atomic number elements, many of which are unstable. Perhaps they meant naturally occurring elements (remember, uranium is naturally occurring, but unstable).

Jake, unstable chemically usually means compounds that break down easily, or perhaps highly reactive elements.

Still, cool table.
Versh

That’s elemental discrimination! I won’t stand for it! I demand my Uranium 92!
Takuan

what about the emotionally wobbly elements?
Orchestra Spy

That’s great. In the future will be ‘periodic tables’ like this one, but whatever substance is placed or spilled on it will be molecular scanned and identified, to which the appropriate sequence of elements will light up.
sindark

There are radioactive isotopes of all elements. For instance, the kind of beryllium formed in the early universe was quite spectacularly unstable. Indeed, it long created a puzzle for cosmologists about why anything heavier than helium existed at all.
sindark

What this table excludes are Actinides and Lanthanides.
Strophe

Want!

Still, it’s probably for the best that the radioactive elements are not included. As we are all aware, Radioactivity + ______ = Superpowers based on whatever ______ is, a la Spiderman, et al. Thus, you’d wind up with all the abilities of a coffee table–which of course just means you have an affinity for coffee and weird books.

Hmm. Maybe I’m a superhero…
wgmleslie

So I shouldn’t have spent all that money on my 2 kg brick of francium-223?!?
Takuan

was it Morroccan?
Bender

Don’t break the ice!
girl_noir

This was an item in the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt last year! There were a fair few nice examples, especially thanks to students who had access to the chemistry department’s considerable stores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Chicago_Scavenger_Hunt