Befuddled by the Periodic Table?

You’ve probably seen the periodic table of the elements before. Perhaps it still haunts your dreams, or maybe it came off as nothing more than requisite visual background noise meant to make a science classroom look more sophisticated. There’s a lot more to this seemingly random collection of blocks, however, than meets the eye.

The periodic table (or PT, as this article will periodically refer to it) and the elements it details have attributes you might never have guessed. From unlikely orig...