Illustration: Lia Kantrowitz
Welcome to The Building Blocks of Everything, our themed week dedicated to the stuff that makes up the world around and inside us: materials.This week we'll be bringing you stories with a focus on matter of all kinds, in its most basic form as the periodic table of elements and in sophisticated new arrangements as the wonder materials of the future.We'll be digging down to the atomic scale, and scaling up with behind-the-scenes peeks at the laboratories and researchers developing materials that are the toughest, the lightest, and generally the weirdest. And beyond the purely physical, we'll be looking at the immaterial materials that make up our digital worlds.Think graphene, computer-generated water, and lab-grown bones: It's a material world.You can find all stories in The Building Blocks of Everything here.Illustration: Lia Kantrowitz