There are around 108 elements on Earth. Scientists can create new elements out of tiny bits of matter, but these have the habit of falling apart after only a few seconds, because they are chemically unstable.
Elements are usually named after the discoverer of them or after a country. The PERIODIC TABLE catalogs all of the elements according to the number of ELECTRONS in the orbits of the atoms that go to make up the elements.
The table was invented by a russian scientist: Dimitri Mendeleyev. Reactive elements are shown on the left, and non-reactive elements are shown on the right. RADIOACTIVE elements are displayed on the bottom of the table. On the table, elements are written in CHEMICAL SHORTHAND. This lets scientists work out formulas far quicker. E.g. the element Zinc is written as Zn. Some of the elements are given seemingly nonsense shorthand symbols (e.g. gold is Au) but this is because the table is partly constructed in latin.
