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."

Comments

Natural vs ???

[seanadams.com]

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?

Re:Natural vs ???

[gurisees]

First of all, there are not "unnatural" elements. They are all natural, because they can all be found in the nature, given the proper conditions. I guess you should better talk about stable and unstable elements, and even then you should specify the conditions under which the element is stable or not.

Stable elements are that way because the energy required to bind together the protons and neutrons is smaller than the energy gain that comes from binding them, so there is an "energy wall" that has to be surpassed in order to break the atom.

Unstable elements don't have such a barrier, because the energy required to keep them together is too high. This means that if you leave them alone they will decay into a nuclei of another element by losing one or more nucleons (neutron or proton), and will keep decaying until the new atom is stable.

This doesn't mean that these elements cannot be found in nature, it only means that you have to be very lucky, or know very well where you have to search them, or wait a long long time to see one of these atoms form (and dissapear) without human help.

Someone has said here that it is impossible to find more "natural" (stable) elements. That seems a very risky thing to say, since most of those affirmations (in the line of "we know it all 'bout this, we won't find anything more here") have proven false in the past. I'd better say that we cannot know for sure, but some think it is possible to find stable configurations at higher atomic numbers (ammount of protons and neutrons).

I hope this makes some sense...

Re:Element 101?

[ajs318]

Actually, I would have thought it would be more like this. Note: "Earth", "Water", "Air" and "Fire" reprsent the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and energy.

• 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!

Re:Darmstadtium? Ewwww

[jafiwam]

Ytterby, Sweden has four elements named after it.

Erbium, Terbium, Ytterbium, Yttrium; all rare earths that were first discovered there.