Slashdot Mirror
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'."
mmmmmm....mini-doughnuts..
-B
Two new elements AND a new form of matter? These latest breakthroughs are simply amazing!
I for one salute our science community. Keep up the good work folks.
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Mmmmm... Forbidden ununpentium....
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I'm sure there will be a movie about it. Bruce Willis the cab-driver and his girlfriend who wears nothing but ductape, all over again.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...but when are we going to have the ununceleron, ununathlon, ununopteron & ununitanium?
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Cuz if it is
Laboratory tests prove the new element can't divide or multiply.
For the tin-foil hat impaired, here is a de-register-it-ized link: The Story
I think what we're all wonder is when are they going to get to Balognium?
Unless then meant that Macs are the UnPentium. In which case the above still holds. :)
You are not the customer.
That's not a new element, that's an old Intel chip!
Can Intel now sue Mendeleev for trademark violation?
This will be a black mark on the physics community for sure...
Interesting notion ... I happened to stumble across a reference to this "ununpentium" the other day while satisfying my science fiction curiosities on a site called "AboveTopSecret.com". Apparently, some of the Area 51 conspiracy theorists believe it's used in anti-gravity research... or something like that.
t 115.htm l
Document about ununpentium published in 1999:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/elemen
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
unuG5ium or unuPowerPCium, pentium doesnt deserve such an honour, we are talking about cpu's right ?
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Virgil:All right, then. For half a million dollars, which of the following is not a subatomic particle? ... well, I was born in Indiana, so that ain't it. And, uh, hmmm ... I'd better call my lifeline.
...
Moe:Oy.
Virgil:
A) Proton
B) Neutron
C) Bonbon, or
D) Electron
Moe:Oh, boy. All right, let's see here, uh
Homer:Well, it all starts when a nulicule comes out of its nest.
Lisa:[taking the phone] The answer is "bonbon!"
Moe:Uh, I'm going to say, "bonbon."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
... obviously :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Isn't it amazing what happens when folks slam atoms together at amazing speeds in a supercollider? For as amazingly advanced as civilization has become, we're still taking baby steps in discovering how the subatomic world really works.
And I don't understand much more than a quark of it.
The ununpentium: Element number 114.9999659899937582.
Tom Geller
We're looking for a stable heavy element. My question is, "Why?"
I mean, as if things weren't already fucked up enough, we actually have people working to bring into this world something which has never existed. And the consequences? Apparently nobody gives a shit.
Haven't these guys ever played DOOM? Or watched Event Horizon? I'd feel a lot safer if their creativity was tinged with a healthy dose of fear.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Excuse me, I'm stupid.
And I have a headache at 3:25 AM. So sue me.
The only thing that girl's bandagewear could have possibly protected against was an NC-17 rating.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This is like the 3rd time we've heard this, and again the article says "pending verification" from other labs' experiment. I wish they'd hold off on the story until it really is verified independently, and we can all bask in the glory of the new elements... :)
They create heavy elements, which are so unstable that they decay as quickly as they were created.
So I'm wondering - what's the point ? Just getting your name associated with an element in the periodic table ? It seems to me that the money would be better spent in doing stuff with real applications (like producing cheaper anti-matter or getting closer to controlled fusion)
The Raven
Both 114 and 116 exist...
http://www.webelements.com/
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
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'.
Containing bubbles and doughnut-like shapes? I say they should be called Duffium and Homerium.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
(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.
so what y'all wanna do
gonna go do Dubna, in Russia
use isotopes in the atom crusher
find elements with a big atomic number
stabilize the subatomic structure, what?
I thought the scientists had lost count and just called it umpteenium.
For all of you who don't pay attention in class, ununpentium is Latin for "115". Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, though...
echo "rm -rf ~/* ; echo "echo "Exit" ; exit" > ~/.bashrc ; exit" > ~user/.bashrc
In that case, how is a new atomic element created? Do scientists try to find a combination of existing weights(individual elements) that add up to a specific new atomic weight?
Wow my head hurts.
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I will always call element 115 Elerium.
FRA: STFU GTFO
at first the slasdot title puzzled me, then I remembered It's All About The Pentiums by Al Yankovic?
...
/. (currently 33.6) - I have two choices: abandon my post (which I probably just should have) or add as much text on one 'line' as needed to bring my average up to some magical number that makes it acceptable. Well, I chose to drop a few lines of the lyrics and type in a paragraph here to make it balance out. Mod me down if you must. ;-)
a parody of "It's All About The Benjamins" by Puff Daddy
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
Uhh, uh-huh, yeah
Uhh, uh-huh, yeah
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
It's all about the Pentiums! (It's all about the Pentiums, baby)
Yeah
Now, what y'all wanna do?
Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?
Uh, uh, loggin' in now
Wanna run wit my crew, hah?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the king of the spreadsheets
Got 'em printed out on my bedsheets
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
My digital media is write-protected
Every file inspected, no viruses detected
I beta tested every operating system
Gave props to some, and others? I dissed 'em
While your computer's crashin', mine's multitaskin'
It does all my work without me even askin'
Got a flat-screen monitor forty inches wide wide
I believe that your says "Etch-A-Sketch" on the side
In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user
You've got your own newsgroup, "alt.total-loser"
Your motherboard melts when you try to send a fax
Where'd you get your CPU, in a box of Cracker Jacks?
Play me online? Well, you know that I'll beat you
If I ever meet you I'll control-alt-delete you
What? What? What? What? What?
Wow, my post had too few characters per line to be accepted by
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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.
I misread it as unimportium, which seems to fit for these type of elements.
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
That's all fine and well,butThe higher elements seem to be pretty worthless. Let me know when they discover jumbonium.
i could not think of anything clever.
Yes, discovered more or less by the same people.
One of the theories is that our universe is shaped like a doughnut. Universe as Doughnut: New Data, New Debate So, the highest and the deepest reaches are similar in our conception. I recollect that Star trek starts off with "Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before." According to Douglas Adam, the answer is 42. I would say the other possible answers are 84, 126, 168, & 210. So, the correct answer is 126.
Q.E.D
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
that would be through alpha decay for those who diid not pay attention in high school physics.
Other than bragging rights, does the discovery of these newer elements (most of which only exist for a tiny moment in time) serve any real purpose? Could someone explain how this type of research has produced real benefit for science?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Some of your suspicions are confirmed in the freakin' article. In great detail, no less.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
Copper will lift with current applied using the Biefeld-Brown effect discovered by Thomas Townsend Brown in 1928.
This is a real effect, NASA has patented its use.
Many people around the world have created small anti-gravity lifters with this effect.
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So, based on that knowledge we can say that Element 115 should be very much like Element 83 (Bismuth), which is the most diamagnetic metal, giving it some very interesting properties.
Also, it should be noted that Element 115 should it possess diamagnetism, and all indications are that it should, it will be a much better diamagnetic material than Bismuth.
I was going to attempt a witty remark about Unintel Inside, but couldn't pull it off...
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
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?
That's about it, yes. Try reading the article, it explains it quite well.
On the album "Running with Scissors".
It's all about the pentiums, baby!
I wonder if the new chemical elements have coffee cup electron orbitals to go with their doughnut nuclei.
So that means they might actually find this element in Iraq. Maybe they bought it from Niger?
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
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
Actually, I beleive the "anti-gravity lifters" lift by ionizing air; they are really just fans with no moving parts.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
There's probably a perfectly simple way to make superheavy elements, too. We just need to get the quarks and the gluons into separate bottles, then just weigh the ingredients and get out the Magimix. All this colliding heavy nuclei at high speed may look good and make for big budgets, but all real progress is made with test tubes and Bunsen burners.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
to provide fodder for ignorant slashdotters to question the value of research by people who have far more knowledge about a topic than they do.
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Copper will lift with current applied
'Lift' being a relative term, of course. It's been pretty thoroughly proven that the Biefeld-Brown effect has nothing to do with anti-gravity, or gravitational fields at all, but is rather a directional force in the same way a traditional rotor or jet behaves.
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.
It's called an Athlon.
It should be called Elerium... you XCom players will know what I'm talking about...
Well these bubbled and donut shaped nuclei are very intresting, Im not up on my nuclear physics, but these heavy nuclei have a problem that the strong force isnt quite strong enough to keep all the protons hanging (so close?) together. In a donut shape you have the same number of nuclei in a larger volume, may end up being more stable as so many positive charges arent jammed so close together.
Things are gonna get interesting.
His tone is a bit harsh, but vlad_petric raises a fair question: "what do they think they might find, or what ability might they gain?" If the answer is, "they don't know -- they're researching it because it was there," then that's fine... but those of us only peripherally aware of this kind of research wouldn't know that without asking.
And really, compared to some of the people in the threads on space travel, his tone was extremely tame.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
But will it mean that:
a) At last, the post-mix crap that comes out of bar soda taps will AT LAST taste like the bottled stuff.
or
b) A supermarket chinese ready-meal will ever taste anything CLOSE to a real take-out?
Until we sort out the fundamentals, nothing else matters (or antimatters!?)
AT&ROFLMAO
my thoughts exactly...so does this mean the next episode of the Gulf War will feature Blaster Bombs? :-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Bubbles in the structure? Maybe it'll form a geodesic? Then we can have Buckminsterfullerium!
About a year ago, my daughter was studying the bohr model of the atom. I was helping her with her homework. The question was, name the subatomic particle that orbits the nucleus. I said, "Well, atoms have protons, neutrons, and what?" She thought for a minute, then replied, "Croutons?"
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Unpentium? So, so, like this?
Heh... I've been waiting for the Golf War Series to get canceled... after all, I'm tired of them bringing back that Damned Bush Character ;)
--Mac "Nine point eight meters per second squared: The Best Damn Windows Accelerator, Ever."
I remember reading about Lazar (for a while there was a joke that when 115 was discovered, it should be called 'lazarium') a few years back, when X Files mania was at its peak. The thing that convinced me he was full of shit was... well, the fact that he hadn't suffered a lethal 'accident' for exposing the guv'mint's biggest secret!
You must think in Russian.
(no text) Really!
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
aluminium...
I've had this sig for three days.
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.
I thought it was supposed to be called:
Unobtainium
or
Reallyexpensium
If scientists at IBM Research had come up with this, would they have called it UnunPowerPC?
It was Bart's response to an April Fools day joke. I think the main plot was just April Fools pranks.
-B
I thought we had this but for a long while, it was known as Unobtainium?
Yup, still looking for Unobtainium and Ultronium on the chart.
Damn! They was just here somewhere!
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Faster cheaper and hotter than UnUnPentium.
Worst
wouldnt that make it just pentium?
looks like intel strikes again..
The explosion put Homer in a coma, and the rest of the episode was everyone talking around him in his hospital bed, reminiscing, showing clips of earlier episodes.
I game, therefore I am...
Intel has their lawyers on standby, waiting to file a trademark infringement suit.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Word on the street is that Intel invented the Pentium brand as you can't copyright/trademark a number, and the logical succesor to the 486 is the 586 - hence PENT-ium. Well, isn't that trademarkable? Otherwise, surely the Nuclear research facilities at CERN etc would have a valid preexistence case? Errr... I'm inventing the new Unium chip... With new salsa dip...
So it's come to this: A Simpsons Clip Show
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
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
You gota add the basil/garlic paste and corriander leafs.
The supermarkets cant synthesize those herbs, and are too scummy cheap asses to put real ones in there.
They should rename the supermaket to Nasa Space Food shop, all tasteless.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The real advance will be with the new universe shaped donuts...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What, are all the good names taken anyway?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick
Basically, then they smash them together and hope they stick.
Eventually some do, and presto! a new element.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
(beats a troll mod :)
I really don't know much about this field, so I didn't know that the research was at more of a fundamental stage than a practical one.(and I have no problem with that, nor their contiuation)
Again, thanks for the response.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
lol! funniest thing I've read all week. The time cube is pretty hilarious on its own, but this is great!
People like doughnuts.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
There is no debate...
Some geeks got together, put a "levitator" into a crude vacuum jar, and discovered it still works. Magic anti-gravity, woohoo!?
Then some NASA guys put one of them into a REAL vacuum chamber, and guess what, it didn't work. As they slowly increased the air pressure in the chamber, it started to work again.
Turns out that all these things do is push charged air around. They work at low air pressure, possibly low enough to be useful on a LEO satellite, but not in outer space. Their energy-lifting capacity efficiency is quite low, much lower than using a fan. But it might have some use in a device which can't have moving parts.
It's a good time to reference:
The Table of Condiments (that Periodically Go Bad),
which is arranged in order of lifetime.
Or maybe even Naquadria...
Probably not, but it's a nice thought.
-- This
Yeah. They shape the fuel into some sort of donut shape one a saucer cup. I saw a diagram on how they assembled the fuel (element 115) in with the ufo ship to make it bend gravity.
I'm sure they're going to talk about with Art Bell tonight on "Coast to Coast - AM" talk radio show.
Great news!! According to Bob Lazar, Element 115 has a "Strong Nuclear Force" to generate the gravity field for "Space-Time Compression." http://www.gravitywarpdrive.com/Element_115.htm
and inefficient to boot.
everybody oohs and aahs at the lifters, but nobody seems to notice the 400 pound power supply needed to lift aluminum foil and balsa wood. a bladed fan and an electric motor can also fly, but uses way less power and can carry more.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
In honor of the creators of X-Com, 115 should be called Gollopium.
-=- 4ntifa -=-
While I personally agree that it's just ionizing the air, two experiments with conflicting results isn't exactly scientific proof. I seem to recall a third experiment besides the NASA one but don't remember off the top of my head who performed it...
Unfortunately there hasn't been just a whole lot of real research into the effect, possibly due to the "UFO anti-gravity sekr3tz" air surrounding it.
Ah, I remember now. The third one was done by the Army Research Labs. The abstract for the paper is here. Unfortunately, the PDF itself seems to have been deleted from the official site (break out your tinfoil hats, heh), but there is a mirror.
Looks like they didn't try the vacuum experiment, but theorized (and did some math based on) that the effect was the sum of two different forces: A smaller one (ionic wind) that would persist in a vacuum, and a larger one (charge drift) that required a fluid dielectric such as the air.
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.
"The temporary names are ununtrium and ununpentium [emphasis added] until the experiment has been duplicated and verified in another lab."
Or until Intel sues for using the name "pentium" in any form of communication without paying a fine to Intel.
Not only does 114 exist, but 116 and 118 do to. I think it's easier to make elements with even numbers because the atomic number is based on the number of protons (i think) and it seems to be easier to add two protons at a time (all these "unun-" elements are made in a lab). This is coming from my very limited knowledge and reasoning skills, so keep that in mind...hope this helps, to whoever asked.
If such a gizmo existed that could reconstruct you with all your memories intact, then I bet there would be extreme sports types who would for instance, skydive they wouldn't use parachutes because 'those are for wusses'. Real world/Road rules challenge could have immolation racing, where the contestants douse themselves with gasoline, and try to run as far as they can before they drop.
And of course, Gladiatore Violencia for dollars!
Eat at Joe's.
"dudupentium" teehee
Or people get a cold and go to the doctor who trivially replaces you with a clone so they can skip the feverish bedrest? Or doctors develve into 1-hour-photolab technicians since anything that is wrong with you can be solved with a patched clone and a brain scan. Those are far from the only interesting hints of future science covered but Cory Doctorow has been there and done that in his downloadable book, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." It's some of the best SF I've read in years, check er out...
I recall Technetium being radioactive, and therefore unstable.
...All the isotopes of technetium are radioactive. It is one of two elements with Z < 83 that have no stable isotopes; the other element is promethium (Z = 61).
The link also mentions:
This is not my sig.
...it is
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
There's also an interactive one, color-coded for lifetimes, here. The half-life of these elements decreases from millenia to microseconds.
Cool link! As usual, since I'm not a physicist, the chart brings up more fun questions than it answers. Here's a question that I hope doesn't get me in trouble with Mr. Ashcroft & co!
According to the page I linked above, Uranium and Plutonium, the most well-known nu-cu-lar bomb materials, have isotopes with half-lives > 100,000 years. That explains how they can be stable enough to be worked into a sub-critical mass that can be compressed explosively into a critical mass.
But look up a couple of steps. Curium, element 96, has a couple of of isotopes with similar longevity. We know that after WWII, scientists studied the heck out of the trans-uranium elements... I wonder if anyone ever attempted to use Curium as a fissile material? Someone had to have the crazy idea to try Plutonium, so you have to figure someone tried it.
I did a quick Google, and didn't find much. But this article is pretty cool -- it turns out that Curium is patented! Glenn Seaborg (immortialized with his own element, #106 Seaborgium) patented it along with Americium -- the radioactive element in your home smoke detector. Does that mean that nobody can use Curium in their bombs without paying royalties to his estate?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Isn't the term 'elements' really a misnomer now that we've quite clearly realized that all 'elements' are really composed of subelements themselves (leptons, baryons, etc)?
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