About Material World
Minerals, materials, elements and how they connect to one another — where every fact shows where it came from and how well established it is.
What it is for
Most materials information online is either a specification sheet with no context or an article with no sources. This is an attempt at a third thing: figures you can actually put side by side, with enough context to know what they mean — and a straight answer when two things cannot honestly be compared at all.
So a page here will say that diamond is 10 on the Mohs scale, that the value came from a specific source on a specific date, and that Mohs is an ordinal scale — which means diamond outranks corundum and is not “one unit harder”. All three of those are part of the answer.
Questions it will not answer
Some questions have no honest answer, and this site says so rather than producing a plausible one. It will not tell you the hardest gemstone, because “gemstone” is a matter of taste and trade rather than a property anything can be measured against. It will not name the strongest metal on the strength of the seven figures it happens to hold. Where the evidence runs out, so does the answer.
Answering the question next to the one you asked is the thing this site works hardest to avoid. How we work sets out the rest, and coverage says plainly which subjects are thinly covered — a gap is a gap, not a sign that there is nothing to know.
How it is funded
It is not, currently. There is no advertising, no affiliate link, no sponsorship, no paid placement and no subscription. Nothing on any page is here because somebody paid for it to be. Two services count page views — Google Analytics, and the operator’s own HEKNO Analytics — and neither loads or sends anything unless you accept it.
If that changes, it will be disclosed prominently and it will not change how evidence is weighed: a commercial relationship must never influence a confidence rating or which claims appear. That rule is worth stating now, while it costs nothing to keep.
Who operates it
Material World is a HEKNO brand, not a separate legal entity. HEKNO Ltd is registered in Scotland under company number SC895711. Registered office: Borthwick Farm Cottage, Gorebridge, EH23 4QZ, United Kingdom.
General enquiries and corrections: hello@hekno.co.uk. Data protection: privacy@hekno.co.uk. Reuse and licensing: licensing@hekno.co.uk.
Where the facts come from
Every figure here comes from a published source, named on the page along with the date it was taken and how well established it is. You never have to take a number on trust: the evidence behind it is shown beside it rather than left out of sight.
Which sources those are, and how far each can be relied on, is set out on data sources. How the evidence is weighed is on how we work.