Two New Elements Join Periodic Table
But they don't yet have names. What would you call them?
Fri Jun 10, 2011 06:26 PM ET
Content provided by AFP
Content provided by AFP
THE GIST
- Two new elements, known for now as 114 and 116, are being added to the periodic table.
- The new elements were first detected in 2004 and 2006, but it took years to confirm them.
The elements are the first to be added since copernicium in 2009.
Corbis
Corbis
Two new elements are being added to the periodic table after they were discovered through a collaboration between U.S. and Russian scientists, a top U.S. chemistry expert said Friday.
The elements are the first to be added since copernicium in 2009. They have not yet been named, but are known for now as 114 and 116.
"Over the past 250 years, there have been basically 100 new elements discovered," said Paul Karol, a chemistry professor at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of the committee that recommended the additions. "But it is becoming more and more difficult to do this so when a new element is discovered, it's actually pretty exciting."
The pair were found through atom-smasher experiments called cross-bombardments, according to research published by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
The experiments, hosted at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia and in cooperation with a U.S. team based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, smashed calcium together with plutonium to make 114, and calcium with curium for 116.
"So they smash those two together and if they fuse, if they stick, you have then made something that is the sum of the two pieces and that is where the new elements come from," Karol told AFP.
The new elements were first detected in 2004 and 2006, but it took years to confirm them.
Now the naming process gets under way, which could takes weeks or months.
"They have named things after geographic places, sometimes people, Greek gods," said Karol, noting that the only restriction is that any name must end in -ium.
"Actually, a community of strange people out in the world see a new element has been discovered and start sending their own suggestions," said Karol, who is not involved with the naming. "I actually regretted not having kept a scrapbook of some of these. They can be weird, they can be politically incorrect. It is actually fun."
Scientists give the strangest birthday gifts. I might be happy with a new fuel-saving car or even an electronic wallet, but apparently that's not enough for the chemist Martyn Poliakoff (photo). For his birthday, the folks over at the the University of Nottingham’s Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Center (NNNC) engraved the periodic table of elements onto a single hair from Poliakoff.
Using a beam of gallium ions to carve, the NNNC's researchers were able to craft one of the smallest periodic table of elements in the world in just seconds. Gallium ions are typically used to repair damage to microscopic structures in semi-conductors, according to Singularity Hub.
They used it for a slightly different purpose this time, but the effect is still the same. Each symbol on the periodic table is four microns tall, or in other words, it would take 250,000 of these symbols stacked on top of each other to reach a single meter. The entire periodic table of elements engraved on his hair. was just 88 microns wide, and 46 microns tall, so there's room for thousands of tiny periodic tables on his hair.
Poliakoff and a team of videographers even went through the hassle of videotaping the whole thing and uploading it to YouTube, and it really is worth a view:
If you want to get even more Poliakoff (and who doesn't, really?), he and some of his friends created a video series about the entire Periodic Table of Elements, all 118 elements included. So, if you have plenty of free time and want to recreate the experience of a college chemistry lecture (again, who doesn't?), your day is set.
