How many elements are there?
I am currently reading “The Magic Of Reality” by Richard Dawkins. In this book, he writes that there are about 100 different kinds of elements of which only about 90 occur in nature.
I wondered what is the exact number of elements known to us. It seems that the answer is 118 – see here.
A fuller description is found on Wikipedia which notes that:
“As of April 2015, 118 elements have been identified, the latest being ununseptium in 2010. Of these, only the first 98 are known to occur naturally on Earth; 80 elements are stable, while the others are radioactive, decaying into lighter elements over various timescales from fractions of a second to billions of years.”
You can find a list of all 118 elements here.