It's mostly non-political, but I suppose politics could somehow end up being brought up with this topic. Anyway, it's kind of neat to think about, but makes you think as well.

New Elements

quote:

2 'superheavy' elements hint at unknown frontiers By James Glanz The New York Times A team of Russian and American scientists is reporting today that it has created two new chemical elements, called superheavies because of their enormous atomic mass. The discoveries fill a gap at the farthest edge of the periodic table and hint strongly at a weird landscape of undiscovered elements beyond. The team, made up of scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, is disclosing its findings in a paper being published in Physical Review C, a leading chemistry journal. The paper was reviewed by scientific peers outside the research group before publication. "Two new elements have been produced," said Walt Loveland, an Oregon State University nuclear chemist familiar with the research. "It's just incredibly exciting. It seems to open up the possibility of synthesizing more elements beyond this." The periodic table is the oddly shaped checkerboard — with an H for hydrogen, the lightest element, in the upper-left-hand corner — that hangs in chemistry classrooms around the world. Each element has a different number of protons, particles with a positive electrical charge, in the dense central kernel called the nucleus. The number of protons, beginning with one for hydrogen, fixes an element's place in the periodic table and does much to determine an element's chemical properties: ductile and metallic at room temperature for gold (No. 79), gaseous and largely inert for neon (10), liquid and toxic for mercury (80). Elements as heavy as uranium, No. 92 on the list, are found in nature, and others have been created artificially. But much heavier elements have been difficult to make, partly because they became increasingly unstable and short-lived. Still, for roughly half a century, nuclear scientists have been searching for an elusive "island of stability," somewhere among the superheavies, in which long-lived elements with new chemical properties might exist. Loveland said that the new results indicated that scientists might be closing in on that island. "We're sort of in the shoals of the island of stability," said Kenton Moody, a Livermore nuclear physicist who was one of the experimenters in the work. "It's an amazing effect," he added. "We're really just chipping away at the edges of it." The experiments took place at a cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator, in Dubna, where the scientists fired a rare isotope of calcium at americium, an element used in applications as varied as nuclear-weapons research and household smoke detectors. Four times during a month of 24-hour-a-day bombardment in July and August, scientists on the experiment said, a calcium nucleus fused with an americium nucleus and created a new element. Each calcium nucleus contains 20 protons; americium contains 95. Because the number of protons determines where an element goes in the periodic table, simple addition shows the new element to bear the atomic number 115, which never had been seen. Within a fraction of a second, the four atoms of Element 115 decayed radioactively to an element with 113 protons. That element never had been seen, either. The atoms of 113 lasted for as long as 1.2 seconds before decaying radioactively to known elements. Scientists generally do not give permanent names to elements until the discoveries have been confirmed by another laboratory. By an international convention based on the numbers, element 113 will be given the temporary name Ununtrium (abbreviated Uut for the periodic table) and element 115 will be designated Ununpentium (Uup). Loveland said he agreed that the new elements would require independent confirmation before they could receive final acceptance. And he conceded that the Dubna find was likely to receive more than the usual amount of scrutiny: Two years ago, the reported discovery of element 118 was retracted after a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was found to have fabricated evidence.

It's cool to think about a new element, but this seems like a huge waste of resources. I'll bet it was just some guy accidentally left the Continuum Transfunctioner on for a few days and lo and behold an atomic mutation finally occurred. I'll bet he left the coffee pot on as well but thinks nothing of the new growths developing on his coffee pot.

Does anyone know what the actual viable use for a new element would be? Make a super heavy bomb that degrades into Calcium and Americium upon impact? Seriously, if they can't even keep it stable for more than 1.2 seconds, what is it's use? Will it give me X-ray vision or invisibility?

Confounded scientists refusing to be constrained by the laws of nature!