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It's All About the Ununpentium
spitefulcrow writes "The New York Times is reporting that elements 113 and 115 have been created by a joint team of Russian and American scientists. The temporary names are ununtrium and ununpentium until the experiment has been duplicated and verified in another lab. According to the article, speculation has been made that 'Rather than being round, nuclei in that region and beyond could contain bubbles and have strange doughnut-like shapes'."
For the tin-foil hat impaired, here is a de-register-it-ized link: The Story
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Free your mind - Flush your toilet
Both 114 and 116 exist...
http://www.webelements.com/
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
(e6003 - chemist and part-time geek).
Element 113 only appeared when the atoms of 115 decayed, and it lasted a lot longer (1.2 seconds- that's a seriously long time in particle physics).
is it the pursuit of the correct combination that is so hard? Or is it just minor alterations to existing elements?
It's a matter of accelerating atoms of one element towards another, in the hope that they collide and fuse. In this case, calcium (20) + americium (95) = ununpentium (115). Then, that decays, losing two protons, and becomes 113.
Does element 114 already exist?
According to this, yes.
Well, one possible benefit would be finding a heavy element that decays in some unusual and useful way, possibly an easier way to start/stop a fission process (random idea, no feasibility assumed).
There are many other nuclei that can take the shape of a torous ( doughnut shaped). I accordance witht he uncertianty principle you can only predict a probobility of the shape, jsut like electron orbitals.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
ununpentium is Latin for "115"
Not quite. Essentially, it's a name made up out of the digits that make the number. So, 1 is 'un', two is 'bi', three 'tri', four 'quad' five 'pent', six 'hex', seven 'sept', eight 'oct', and nine I can't remember; it's probably 'non'. Then you stick 'ium' on the end, because all element names have to end in 'ium'. Stick '115' in there, and you get ununpentium. The resemblance to the Intel chip is (almost) pure coincidence.
Actually, it's 1, 1, 5. Not 115.
To be honest, I think they name them with Latin, where "un" = one, and "pent" = five, hence one-one-five (115).
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
some people believe in 'the island of stability' a google search gives this: http://www.public.asu.edu/~jpbirk/CHM-115_BLB/Chpt 21/sld038.htm (couldn't find a better picture)
http://www.cerncourier.com/main/article/39/7/18
Measurements lead to the idea that there would be a quite stable element with a very high atom mass.
Interesting? I remember reading about Ununpentium years ago right here. How can this be news?
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
Nope, sorry. Cyanide is 5 times more poisonous than plutonium. Botulism is over a thousand times more deadly.
I don't read AC A human right
The big thing is they think they are approaching the island of stability. Elements in this "island" will be stable and could have a ton of potential uses. Discoveries such as this are stepping stones to even greater achievements.
Time to reveal my true geek.
What you said is not quite right, in latin "unus" is 1, which you basically got right.
The problem is that "pent" is a greek prefix for 5, not latin. In latin 5 is "quinque", so 1-1-5 should be ununquintuim, if you wanted to stick with latin.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
plasticpixel (323537) sez: "I'm recalling this from memory but, I think Lazar got the idea for Element 115 from a Popular Science magazine article from the 1960's."
Could this be it?:
April 1969 (pages 57-67) issue of "Scientific American" by Dr. Glenn Seaborg
Discusses transuranics, #114 in depth, but includes others.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
quantum bit (225091) sez: "It's still a quite interesting effect though, and shows promise for building propulsion devices with no moving parts. The debate is still on as to whether it requires a dielectric medium (i.e. air), or can work in a vacuum as well."
Brown tested his devices in a vacuum chamber at GE in 1959. The results are not publically available. However, the design he was working on at the time involved using a gas jet as the generator of the electrostatic charge as well as the carrier necessary to create the effect. If so, yes, it is an ionic flow effect, but this does not mean it's restricted to atmospheric use. His patent on this design is US# 3,022,430.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Fluorine (you misspelled it, argh), chlorine, bromine, and iodine, and don't forget astatine all end in 'ine' because they are all halogens.
Argon, xenon, radon, and also neon and krypton all end in 'on' because they are noble gases.
The other oddballs you mention: hydrogen, oxygen, boron, carbon, silicon, nitrogen, were all named back when chemistry was a little less organized than it is today. However, there is still structure in their names: hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are all gases, and the 'gen' implies that they are involved in the creation of some other substance. In the case of hydrogen, water. In the case of oxygen, acid (although this turned out to be incorrect -- oxygen has nothing to do with acidity).
Boron, carbon, and silicon are all solid, nonmetallic elements.
You'll notice that all the metals end in 'ium', except for those which have been known far before the advent of chemistry (gold, silver, iron, nickel, copper, etc.)
The vast majority of elements end in 'ium' because the vast majority of elements are metallic in nature.
Except that element 115 probably measurably existed for about a nanosecond, giving it limited practical use.
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It doesn't matter if they are completely stable, just stable enough to use, something which breaksdown over a thousand years is still useable.
I'm no physicist, but I think the instability is a direct result of the size of the element. The bigger they get, the more radioactive
More or less, but when you start looking at alot of these big elements you realize we don't know all that much about them, and so maybe one of these will turn out to be stable, as the article mentioned( although in very bad terms) there are certian numbers of particles which appear more stable, although we don't reaaly know right now, we're still smashing things together to see if something neat happens.
So I'm wondering - what's the point ?
Elements 83 (bismuth) and under have one or more stable isotopes, and one or more unstable isotopes. So, for example, hydrogen (element 1) is stable, but deuterium (H-2) and tritium (H-3) are not. Nevertheless, these unstable isotopes are useful. Deuterium is used in nuclear medicine, in heavy water for nuclear reactors, and in fusion reactions. So...
Myth: Unstable isotopes are useless.
Myth Busted!
Past element 83, there are no stable isotopes. There's a pretty good chart showing the stable and unstable isotopes here. There's also an interactive one, color-coded for lifetimes, here. The half-life of these elements decreases from millenia to microseconds. However...
It's been known for decades that certain numbers of protons are "magic" in that they "pack together" in a very stable manner. Same thing with neutrons. As we approach the next "magic" numbers, the half-lives of the elements should start going back up. And they do.
In this latest experiment, the particular isotope of element 113 *may* have lasted for as long as 1.2 seconds. That's a long time for such a heavy element. Elements under 113 last for much less time, so that shows that we may be reaching the region of stability.
The region of stability is apparently close by, and *stable* superheavy elements will assuredly have useful properties.
And that's why nuclear chemists continue to search for heavier and heavier artificial elements. Because one day one of them will last for more than a few seconds. And then one day, one of them will last forever. Instant revolution in materials science.
Myth: There's no point searching for superheavy elements.
Myth Busted!
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
A heavy metals is any metal with a specific gravity higher than 5. Everybody knows the dangerous ones: Lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, plutonium, and uranium. But there are plenty of them that arn't dangerous.
Tungsten, Ruthenium, Palladium, Platinum, Gold, Rhodium, Osmium and Iridium are all heavy metals, all far less dangerous than lead, and all slightly denser to twice as dense as lead or mercury. Some lighter heavy metals include calcium, copper, iron, and zinc. And you need all of THOSE ones to live. (That's part of why heavy metals are toxic. They replace these elements in essential reactions within the body)
Besides heavy metals not always being toxic, an elements density is also unrelated to its atomic mass. Molybdenum's atomic mass is half that of lead, but they have close specific gravities.
Instead of freting over the effects on children of adding an element that hasn't even been discovered yet to paint, you should probably look into all the mercury that doctors inject into children every year.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
110 is 270 microseconds.
112 is 240 microseconds.
116 is 47 milliseconds
Can we say they really exist, or should we call it rather a random aglomeration of electrons, protons and neutrons?
Saying they were created is just like saying jumping is flying.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Heh, except that they didn't exist right after the big bang. From what I've read on the theory, the quickly-expanding universe was still too violent and active to permit the existence of anything more cohesive than hydrogen for a good deal of time. It took a really long time for it to cool off enough for stuff like carbon and oxygen to form, let alone the heavy metals.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
Deuterium is a stable isotope of hydrogen. Tritium is the only unstable, radioactive isotope. It's used in things like watches, for that nice tritium glow (the radiation produced isn't that penetrating, so keeping the tiny quantity of tritium gas in a glass tube is enough to minimize the risk... compare that to radium watch dials!).
Since deuterium isn't radioactive, it can't be used as a radiological tracer. Its use in nuclear reactors is because deuterium-laced "heavy" water (D20) is better at acting as a moderator for nuclear reactions. Normally, the neutrons produced in a reactor are moving too fast to cause a chain reaction. When they collide with light water, the hydrogen atoms absorb the neutrons and turn into deuterium. The deuterium atoms, however, simply slow down the neutrons without absorbing them, thus improving the efficiency of the chain reaction. That's why heavy water is useful for nuclear reactors.
Light water reactors are more common today, just because light water is slightly easier to get (heavy water is quite common in the oceans, but requires processing to separate the relevant isotopes), but heavy water reactors were important early on in the development of nuclear power, and they still have their uses today.
What you say about electostatic repulsion is mostly true. The binding energy of the nucleus generally decreases as the number of protons differs more from the number of neutrons, since protons and neutrons are separately subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. That is, a proton and a neutron can share an energy/spin state, whereas two protons can't, forcing one of them up to a higher energy level. That's the primary effect in lighter nuclei, keeping the number of protons and neutrons nearly equal.
As the number of protons becomes larger, and the net charge becomes greater, electrostatic repulsion between the protons becomes more of an effect: it grows with the square of the number of protons. Adding extra neutrons increases the radius of the nucleus, spacing the protons farther apart from each other on average and therefore decreasing the electrostatic repulsion.
Actually, it lasted for almost a second. Remember, half-lives go back up as you reach predicted islands of stability, one of which happens to be at p=126.
StoneCypher is Full of BS