|
Believe it or not, the newest additions to the Periodic Table of Elements still don't have names. These six elements occupy positions 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, and 118 in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Periodic Table. The last three are listed as "mysterious elements." The site assures us that "these elements have... been produced and can exist." Human-made element 110 was first produced in 1994 at the Heavy Ion Research Laboratory, in Darmstadt, West Germany, by fusing together atoms of nickel and lead. Elements
111 and 112 were discovered at the same lab in 1994 and 1996 respectively. The newest named element, Meitnerium (109), was created in Germany in 1982, by researchers using fusion techniques to make new, heavy nuclei. A quick Yahoo! search on "periodic table newest element" appeared to provide the answer in the first result. It read Element 106 Named Seaborgium, and the comment read "seaborgium is the newest name to be added to the family of 'transuranium' elements." But after we clicked on the link, we discovered that our source was out of date.
It was a scientific article from 1994 discussing an element that was first created in 1974 at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and was named 20 years later in honor of Nobel Laureate chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, the co-discoverer of plutonium. And although the award-winning Periodic Table from Los Alamos seemed like a current, reliable resource, we did another search to learn more about "mysterious" element 118. Announced to the physics community in a 1999 paper, the discovery of 118 was retracted
this year. Other research labs have been unable to replicate the experiment that initially produced the elusive 118, which supposedly decays milliseconds after it's produced. Learning of the retraction made us glad that we always double-check our facts. Perhaps the folks who first "spotted" element 118 would've been wise to do the same. That way, their discovery might not have ended up destined for the Periodic Table of Rejected Elements, to sit forever alongside Tedium and Chagrin.
|
