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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."
Darm, if I'm not mistaken, means 'intestine'. Stadt means city. So this element is Intestine-city-um.
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?
Ununnilium isn't good enough for them? Sir Ununnil must be rolling over in his grave.
--
Element: WOMAN
Symbol: Wo
Atomic Weight: 120 +/-
Physical Properties: Generally round in form. Boils at nothing and may freeze anytime. Melts whenever treated properly. Very bitter if not used well.
Chemical Properties: Very active. Possesses strong affinity to gold, silver, platinum, and precious stones. Violent when left alone. Able to absorb great amount of exotic food. Turns slightly green when placed beside a better specimen. Ages rapidly.
Usage: Highly ornamental. An extremely good catalyst for disintegration of wealth. Probably the most powerful income reducing agent known.
Caution: Highly explosive in inexperienced hands.
Didn't they realize Darmstadtium is an anagram of "Mama Rudd's Tit"?
What the hell were they thinking?
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
It's already on the webelements.com page, with some interesting info on the chemical makeup.
I wonder how small it's decay time is. I know the elements before it have halflives of several nano- to picoseconds. It'll be gone before you can say "fast". These scientist better not have a cold: Press the button to start experiment. HATSJOO!!!". Oh darned, missed it.
Ununnillium gone, Darmstadtium in. Mendelev would be proud.
Scientists have announced within days of the discovery of element 110, the new element 111 provisionally named "SLASHDOTIUM". The discovery opens the door to a new group of elements that should fall in quick succession. The team are working hard on geekium, freakium and phrackium. However elements past his group look more difficult to identify. "We had high hopes we could pin down muckrosoftium as element 115 - but the damn thing just wasn't stable".
Chemical element 110, which was discovered in 1994, will finally get a name tomorrow.
A committee will vote at this weekend's General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in Ottawa, Canada. It is expected to approve the element's informal moniker, 'darmstadtium', and give it the chemical symbol Ds. The title honours the Laboratory for Heavy Ion Research (called GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, where the substance was first made.
The natural elements run out at number 92, uranium. Several more have been made artificially since 1939, when researchers at the University of California at Berkeley bombarded uranium with a beam of neutrons to create element 93, which they called neptunium.
Firing subatomic particles at heavy atoms became the preferred method of making new elements. The basic aim is to add more protons to the atomic nuclei - an element is defined by the number of protons its atoms contain. Some new elements were also detected in the fallout from nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s.
Element-making soon became a race. In the 1960s and 1970s the two main players were a Soviet group at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and a team spanning the University of California and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The discoverers of a new element generally win the right to name it, although the new name still has to receive IUPAC approval.
The natural elements run out around
number 92
But disputes over claimed sightings of new elements have led to acrimonious and nationalistic battles over naming. These elements decay quickly, and are often made only a few atoms at a time - so it can be hard to gather convincing evidence.
In 1987 IUPAC was forced to assess priority claims over all the new elements from 104 to 107. Then in 1993 a new controversy erupted when the Berkeley team wanted to name element 106 after nuclear-chemistry pioneer Glenn Seaborg. IUPAC insisted at first that 'seaborgium' broke the rules, because Seaborg was still alive at that time. It relented only after the American Chemical Society threatened rebellion.
No one disputes GSI's claim to element 110. There was, however, some relief when the German results, produced by fusing lead and nickel nuclei, were confirmed last June at Berkeley using the same process1. Element-hunters have been more cautious since a Berkeley team was forced to retract unreproducible data published in support of a reported 1999 creation of element 118.
001 Earth
010 Wind
011 Fire
100 Water
101 ?
110 Darmstadtium
Please can anyone fill in the gap. What's the element 101?
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
Just one more answer I'd like to add to your questions (because so many have been submitted). The natural elements stop occuring after atomic number 92, yes. But it's also worth point out that for all intents and purposes, technetium (element #43) does not exist in nature either.
After decades of searching, extremely small quantites were obtained from pitchblend, but that's negligible.
Long story short (long answer being availabe from google cache here) is that pairing energy makes the atom extremely unstable and causes it to break -a(C)Y quickly.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
As the elements 111 and 112 are also discovered by GSI, and the whole hierarchy Europium (element 63), Germanium (32), Hassium (108) and now Darmstadtium (110) is taken, I am really curious how they will name these two.
:-)
Maybe, they'll take Wixhausenium (GSI is located in a district of Darmstadt called Wixhausen), but that wouldn't be too good as the german word Wichsen means "jerk off...", and the words Wix... and Wichs... are spoken exactly the same.
"Pounds - not kilograms?"
Or, married vs looking.
Indeed. It's an old joke in Dutch to say "I'm expecting a fax from Darmstadt" to excuse yourself to go for a shit...
Sentimentality is merely the Bank Holiday of cynicism.
- Oscar Wilde
The Wooden Periodic Table
:-)
Perhaps some of you knew this one already, but it's one of the most useful ones I've found so far and I really like those huge and high quality pictures they have for most elements that you can take meaningful pictures of.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...thinking that it was already called Ununnilium.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
I know this is offtopic but, this is the most beautiful periodic table.
Try taking 92 shots of vodka and being stable after that.
"Chemically, darmstadtium is in the same Group as nickel, palladium, and platinum (Group 10). Unlike these lighter atoms, darmstadtium decays after a small fraction of a thousandth of a second into lighter elements by emitting a-particles which are the nuclei of helium atoms." So that is where microsoft got the idea! Here is a brief description of the real palladium. Since it is used in industry for membrane gas extraction and isolation tech, then I guess having software that can control the user is the a valid concept. I see why they are using the code name Longhorn now someone in the spin department realised that palladium is an element that is actually used to control things!
Hopefully Longhorn or MS "Palladium" will turn out
to be more like 'darmstadtium' which is really vapour ware and only lasts a few thousandths of a before self distructing!
Here is the real scoop on Palladium
"Standard state: solid at 298 K
Colour: silvery white metallic
Classification: Metallic
Availability: palladium is available in many forms including wire, foil, "evaporation slugs", granule, powder, rod, shot, sheet, and sponge. Small and large samples of palladium foil, sheet, and wire can be purchased from Advent Research Materialsvia their web catalogue.
Ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum together make up a group of elements referred to as the platinum group metals (PGM). Compound of the platinum group metals and their Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) are available online through the Alfa Aesar catalogue.
Palladium is a steel-white metal, does not tarnish in air, and is the least dense and lowest melting of the platinum group metals. When annealed, it is soft and ductile. Cold working increases its strength and hardness. It is used in some watch springs.
At room temperatures the metal has the unusual property of absorbing up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen. Hydrogen readily diffuses through heated palladium and this provides a means of purifying the gas.
Isolation
Here is a brief summary of the isolation of palladium.
It would not normally be necessary to make a sample of palladium in the laboratory as the metal is available commercially. The industrial extraction of palladium is complex as the metal occurs in ores mixed with other metals such as platinum. Sometimes extraction of the precious metals such as platinum and palladium is the main focus of a partiular industrial operation while in other cases it is a byproduct. The extraction is complex and only worthwhile since palladium is the basis of important catalysts in industry.
Preliminary treatment of the ore or base metal byproduct with aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric acid, HCl, and nitric acid, HNO3) gives a solution containing complexes of gold and platinum as well as H2PdCl4. The gold is removed from this solution as a precipitate by treatment with iron chloride (FeCl2). The platinum is precipitated out as (NH4)2PtCl6 on treatment with NH4Cl, leaving H2PdCl4 in solution. The palladium is precipitated out by treatment with ammonium hydroxide, NH4OH, and HCl as the complex PdCl2(NH3)2. This yields palladium metal by burning."
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I remember a little more: nuclei are made of protons (positively charged) and neutrons (no charge), usually in roughly equal numbers (except Hydrogen, which is usually just a proton). The protons repel each other. The nucleus is held together by a very powerful, but very short range nuclear force between both protons and neutrons. As the nucleus gets bigger, the electric repulsion starts to overcome the nuclear force, and the nucleus becomes more and more likely to decay. But I don't remember why you can't just have a pile of neutrons...
Actually #92, Uranium, is unstable, but U238 has a half-life of 4.4 billion years, which is why it's not that hard to find (about half of it has decayed since the creation of the earth). I think all elements above 83 (Bismuth) are unstable. The short-lived ones are found in nature as the result of decay of Uranium or the other longer-lived ones. See this table of isotopes.
Actually everything past bismuth 209 is unstable. 92 is merely the last element to have any isotopes that are stable on a geological timescale (U238 half-life around 4.5 * 10^9 years).
As for why, simply put their nuclei are very loosely held together. Neutrons hold nuclei together with a force known as binding energy (think of it as atomic glue).
For very light elements, (up to around calcium (element 20) stability is achieved by more or less associating one neutron with every proton. However, for heavier elements, an excess of neutrons is needed to hold the nucleus together - the excess growing as elements get heavier.
Simply put (and I hope any physicists will forgive me for this - they have equations and everything!) The electrostatic repulsion between the protons in the nucleus operates over a larger distance than the stronger, binding force of the neutrons. As the nucleus grows, the protons in the nucleus experience a weakening binding force. Beyond a certain point (Bismuth 209) this binding force is insufficient to hold the nucleus together forever - the nucleus will decay.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Since it has no electrons, Caltransium is inert; however, it can be detected chemically, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. According to the Berkeley discoverers, a minute amount of Caltransium caused one reaction to take over four days to complete, when it would normally have occurred in less than one second.
Caltransium has a normal half-life of approximately three years at which time it does not actually decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons, and assistant vice-neutrons exchange places. Some tests have shown that the atomic number actually increases after each reorganization, although it is not yet clear where the extra morons may originate. Research at other laboratories indicate that Caltransium is known to be highly toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reactions where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how Caltransium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising. Due to lack of funding, U.C. Berkeley has no plans for further evaluation.
Shamelessly reposted from a joke someone sent me years ago. For people that don't live in California, CalTrans is the California transportation authority.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
The Element Formerly Known As Ununnilium.
What surprises me the most is that nobody has proposed the name to be Cowboynealadium yet.
You can't just have a big pile of neutrons because neutrons convert to protons and electrons with a halflife of about 10 minutes if not bound up with sufficient protons. So if you started with 200 neutrons, after awhile you'd end up with some mix of protons and neutrons forming elements.
:)
On the other hand, in appropriate conditions (very large pressures) you can suppress that conversion and you get a very big pile of neutrons - a neutron star. Unfortunately, I don't think we have the ability to generate sufficient pressures for this in a lab
NichG
It's not D. It's Ds.
Nobody gets Nitrogen (N) mixed up with Niobium (Nb) or Nickel (Ni), so I don't see this as being a problem.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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
IMO, it would help out the scientific community immensely if we were to sell the naming rights for new elements to the highest bidder. Instead of some faceless community pondering the appropriate name, just put it on the auction block. Then we'd get meaningful names suitable for posterity, like Enron (pronounced En-ern), Pacbellium, Microsoftite, Pepsium...
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
Isn't that name already the official name for element 110? According to Wikipedia, the name was officially accepted by the IUPAC in May 2003 already.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
107: Bohrium 108: Hassium 109: Meitnerium Hope this helps. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. This new element has been tentatively named "Administratium."
Administratium has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 111 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
Since Administratium has no electrons, it is inert.However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take less than a second.
Administratium has a normal half-life of three years; it does not decay but instead undergoes reorganization. In fact, Administratium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization causes some morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Administratium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as "critical morass." You will know it when you see it...
Actually, you can and you hardly need to do anything for it. It happens all by itself. Let me refresh your memory:
(written by William DeBuvitz in April 1988, published in the January 1989 issue of The Physics Teacher; there is also a related publication by Ellin Beltz about Administrontium)