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Chemical Element 110 To Be Named
An anonymous reader writes "According to Nature Magazine, chemists will vote in Ottawa, Canada this week, and are expected to approve the chemical element 110's informal moniker, 'darmstadtium', and give it the chemical symbol Ds. The title honors the Laboratory for Heavy Ion Research (called GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, where the substance was first made. It seems that 'disputes over claimed sightings of new elements have [previously] led to acrimonious and nationalistic battles over naming', but not in this case."
I never studied much chemistry, but I hope someone can answer a couple questions:
According to the article, the "natural" elemements "run out" at 92.
1) What does this mean exactly?
2) Is it not possible for us to discover other natural elements?
3) Is it inconceivable that our "new" elements could also be produced under similar conditions in nature?
4) Have all of these new elements only existed in very small quantities for short periods of time, under controlled conditions?
There have been more or less serious attempts to name the element Policium, as 110 is the emergency call for police in Germany. I would have preferred that, for the sake of ease of pronounciation.
It was called "Darmundestat" in the 11th century. Historians are not quite certain as to the origin, but it definitely has nothing to do with intestines.
Darmund seems to have been a first name back then.
- 001 - air - gases - there is only one atmosphere.
- 010 - water - liquids - water now known to contain two elements in the ratio 2:1.
- 011 - fire - energy - fire needs fuel, heat and oxygen.
- 100 - earth - solids - earth was once thought to have four corners.
Actually this would be neater if Earth was 000, then we can just use two digits - AJS.Air and Fire are associated with masculine, spiritual and software. They have odd numbers which are also associated with these properties. Earth and Water are associated with feminine, material and hardware. They have even numbers which are also associated with these properties. I'm not going to comment on the obvious gender symbolism of the one and the zero at LSB in odd numbers
Note to cynical moderators: Please don't mod me down -1, Beardy-Weirdy. I thought this stuff up for the express purpose of assisting New Agers to rectify their money/sense discrepancies!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Having studied in Darmstadt, let me tell you it's not a place you'll wnat to name an element after.
Unless, that is, it is a really geeky element that drinks lots of beer and never meets any women.
You see, Darmstadt's main claim to fame is its technical university which sadly results in a geek/women ratio of about 250...
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Americium is used in smoke alarms; they work by having an americium source opposite (essentially) a Geiger counter, and if the count-rate falls (due to smoke getting in the airgap between source and detector) then the alarm is triggered.
I'd call that an important use of it, to be honest.
Not exactly true. Naturally occurring Plutonium exists in trace amounts in Pitchblend. It is more common in supernova remnants.
From the EPA website:
In extremely rare cases, rocks with a high localized concentration of uranium can provide the right conditions for making small amounts of plutonium naturally. This natural process is called spontaneous fission. Only very small (trace) amounts of natural plutonium have ever been found in nature.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
That's partly because adamantane is already a chemical compound. They tend NOT to like to cross those lines back and forth.
Besides, why should it be an element--because it came from a comic?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Good point - how about, 92 is the heaviest element occurring naturally in a 4.5B-year-old planet?
Of course, given that some of these really heavy ones have half-lives many times less than a second (this one is 110 microseconds), it seems fair to say that, for all intents and purposes, none is left. If a supernovae somehow made 10^10,000,000 atoms of this, around one atom would be left after an hour. Note that I don't think there are any stars this large.
End result is that, by the time any planet has formed in which this stuff can occur, it will have decayed.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Ytterby, Sweden has four elements named after it.
Erbium, Terbium, Ytterbium, Yttrium; all rare earths that were first discovered there.
nothing else just a question