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Element 118 Created
BuzzSkyline writes, "The heaviest element yet, Element 118, has been created in Dubna, Russia by a collaboration of researchers from Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US. They created the new element by fusing together Californium (element 98) and Calcium atoms. The achievement comes five years after the scandal-plagued retraction of an earlier claim, which was based on fabricated data, that three atoms of element 118 had been produced at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The achievement was reported on October 9 in the journal Physical Review C (subscription needed to read more than the abstract)."
Element 137 should be the max element: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untriseptium
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118 Is supposed to be the first element of the Magic Island of Stability, doubly magic even.t ml
Most man-made elements (Plutonium+) are incredibly short-lived and make poor paper weights.
Learn something http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3313/02.h
Were that I say, pancakes?
Doh! Sorry, I mean 114. :-/
Were that I say, pancakes?
Ha, ha ... There was that long controversy with naming before, so the last time someone thought they'd created 118, they intended to name it Ghiorsium after Albert Ghiorso who "helped discover numerous chemical elements." I'd expect something similarly NOT controversial, while IUPAC will likely settle any disputes like they did for the long-disputed transfermiums in 1997. These are some of the same guys right? so maybe still "Ghiorsium," and maybe we'll find out tomorrow at the press conference. BG
A lot of people seem to be dismissing this as without a practical use. However there is method to the seemed madness of making ever-bigger nuclei. Elements tend to be either stable or unstable - carbon is stable, uranium is not. This stability is caused by the arangement of protons/neutrons in the atoms' nucleii. I'm not exactly sure why this occurs - I'm a biologist, I'm not really meant to know - but whether or not a nulceus is stable or not follows a pattern determined by "shell-model" calculations (see here for the science bit).
So although making 3 atoms of 118 doesn't seem to amount to much, especially as it instantly falls apart, it's another step on the way to making th first of the synthetic heavy elements in a "stability island". It's thought that such a material could have strange and useful properties. Or it could be a complete waste of money and be boring as hell. I don't know, but that's the point of research at the end of the day...
Actually, they created and discovered it, since they had to make it from smaller nuclei before it could be observed.
Don't confuse chemical stability and nuclear stability. Noble gases win the first game, iron and lead the second one (while for instance Francium sucks at both).