About Moleculium
Moleculium is a free reference for chemistry students, teachers and anyone curious about what substances are made of. Every element and compound page pairs a model you can turn and zoom (for ionic solids such as salt, a drawing of one formula unit) with a short, sourced explanation of what that substance is, how it is put together, where it turns up and why it matters.
Who runs it
Moleculium is written and edited by İsmail Tufan, an electrical and electronics engineer and an MSc student at Özyeğin University in Istanbul, Turkey. İsmail Tufan is not a chemist, and the site does not ask you to trust it on that basis. Its authority comes from the process described below: every fact is taken from a cited source and checked against it, and every page lists its sources so you can check them too. Corrections and questions go to the address on the contact page.
Why it exists
Most students meet molecules as flat drawings in a textbook, and most reference sites bury the shape of a molecule under tables. Moleculium starts from the shape: the model comes first, and the text explains what the model shows and what it cannot show, such as the lone pairs that bend a water molecule or the lattice around a single formula unit of salt.
Where the data comes from
Numbers are never typed in by hand. Structures, formulas and identifiers come from PubChem at the US National Library of Medicine; standard atomic weights from IUPAC's Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights (CIAAW); the periodic-table layout and electron configurations from Periodic-Table-JSON. They are downloaded when the site is built, stored with the site, and printed exactly as the source gives them. A compound's molar mass is added up from the standard atomic weights, the same way the molar mass calculator does it. Each page lists the further sources its text relies on, such as OpenStax textbooks, the NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards and PubChem's safety summaries.
How pages are written and checked
The explanatory text is drafted with the help of AI (Anthropic's Claude), under rules that keep it tied to sources. For each page a fact sheet is assembled first, and every fact on it is quoted from a cited source kept on file. The draft may use only facts from that sheet; a claim no source supports is left out rather than guessed.
Each draft is then checked three ways. Automated checks test the structure, length, reading level and wording of every page, look for text copied from its sources, and inspect the finished pages as they appear in the browser. A separate AI review checks every number, name and explanation against the cited sources, and its corrections are applied before publication. Pages are written in batches of about ten. İsmail Tufan reads a sample of pages from every batch before it goes live, and corrections from readers are acted on.
Safety sections stay general and point to the authoritative sheets (PubChem's Laboratory Chemical Safety Summaries and the NIOSH Pocket Guide). Moleculium gives no doses, no procedures and no instructions for making anything.
Mistakes
A site this size will contain errors. If you find one, please write to the address on the contact page with the page and the problem; corrections are checked against the sources and the page is updated.