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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)."
I have ten pounds of Element 119 right here...
Guys, you can't just tell an element as young as element 118 it's heavy. You'll crush its self esteem. I think the proper term these days is "in danger of becoming overweight".
Element 137 should be the max element: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untriseptium
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
Quick, gate it through K'Tau's sun before it's too late!
I'll believe it when I see it!
So I guess this announcement has an element of truth about it...
[OK, shoot me now.]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I sure hope they name it something nice though. "Ununoctium", "Kurchatovium" and "Hassium" don't exactly roll off the tongue. No pun intended...
Okay... back to work.
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?
Would it be more appropriate to say that element 118 has been successfully instantiated in a laboratory for the first time?
This is not a rhetorical question.
I thought the heaviest element was Spamium which is destroying Internetium.
Doh! Sorry, I mean 114. :-/
Were that I say, pancakes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untriseptium#Signific ance via http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=200807 &cid=16441619
'Gentlemen! I have created element 118, the heaviest element on earth and' *crash* 'Doc? Where are you? Doc? Dammit, that's one big hole, we really need to get those floorboards fixed.'
My inferiority complex isn't as good as your's
Self-esteem problem? Maybe it's time you try Nu-kleeas(R), the all new "proton enhancement" solution.
Just take it 30 femtoseconds before any quantum coupling and you will see an all new you.
Ask your PhD about it today to see if the little "quantum packet" is right for you.
Warning: Side effects may include uncertainty, fission, fusion, photon emission, prolonged electron excitation, ionization, or other side effects. Tell your PhD if you are engaged in any antimatter collisions. Nu-kleeas(R) is not right for everybody.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Yeah, but not whatever isotope they created - if I read properly, they discovered they'd made it due to the resultant decay it left.
Unfortunatly, the process for combining Californium and Calcium (which is called "Californication") has already been patented by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I'm not a particle physicist, but from what I can see, it's saying that the problem is that some of the electrons would have to be moving faster than the speed of light. But is that really an issue? Maybe you can only have positive ions of elements above that, but they'd still be atoms of those elements. Heck, even with no electrons at all, it would still just be an extremely positive ion! At least as I understand matters. Basically, unless I'm misunderstanding or misinterpreting, 137 or 138 is the heaviest element for which a neutral atom can exist, but there should be no limit to elements for which positive ions can exist up till you reach the point where gravity starts to become a larger factor than the strong nuclear force.
Earth, Air, Fire, Water... What's the fifth one?
Milla Jovovich.
cornnuts.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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...
Surprise (c.f. Terry Pratchett - Theif of Time)
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Actually, they created and discovered it, since they had to make it from smaller nuclei before it could be observed.
As usual, Wikipedia is your friend. :) The island covers atomic masses in the high 200s, atomic numbers in the low 100s.
AFAIK in Asia, they have a 5th one: metal.
Heart. Then Captain Planet shows up to take care of the bad guys...duh.
hiphop-universe.com
Nibblonium! And it shall double as spaceship fuel, as long as the Nibblonians continue to be prolific poopers.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
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).
"so dense that 1 ton weighs exactly 1000 tons"
Why UNIX?
Captain Picard was the best IMHO
Mila Jovavich covered in hot cornuts.
~X~
~X~
If you really want to go by the movie, it's technically love. I guess most slashdoters, being linux-using, slightly unattractive über-geeks with little education in literature might have missed that because the mindnuming hotness of Ms. Jovovich's body was standing in the way.
I think you're quintessentially right, but the film was really not THAT good.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Get our custom element naming kit and you will receive:
## iron and/or aluminum, depending on dust conditions
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
The point you're probably missing is that Ms. Jovovich's body is love.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
it's not stable enough to detect except by its decay chain. It would be nice if they would work on getting over the hump to the next island of stability, so that we could bag these things in an ion trap, and measure their mass directly. OTOH, if this keeps physicists occupied and out of the bars, I'm all for it.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Some other values (leaving off the uncertainty):No clear trend, I'd say.
No, it was named after the most stable political entity of whole Europe, with a record setting 1500 years of continious history, founded by the Franconian Chlodwig in 507, an entity which also fought the most wars since the Middle Age (more than the two runners up United Kingdom and Austria combined) and has the oldest orthographic rules (not changed since about 400 years). You may have some issues with its existance, but most of them are caused by the fact, that this entity is so stable and seemingly undestroyable, even though it sometimes does the trick by weaseling out of consequences ;)
this gives interesting insights - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3313/02.ht ml
Electrons fill out from the inside outward. If you try to take an electron out of an inner, lower energy orbital, then an outer electron will jump down into it. So in the long run you can't have any electrons at all.
The secondary problem is that superheavy elements already have a decay mode in which a proton captures an all-too-close inner electron and becomes a neutron, at which point it's no longer the same element.
It's the innermost electrons that have the problem? Are you sure about that? I would expect that the outermost electrons would have the farthest to travel, and would therefore need the greatest speed, so removing electrons from the outer shells would solve the problem. The outer electrons are higher energy, and I would assume that this is partly related to them having higher velocity. But I can see arguments for the other way around too, and I don't know which is correct.
I agree that electron capture is another interesting issue here. And it is curious that 137 is the nearest whole number to the inverse of the fine structure constant.
Yeah, slashdot is so geeky we actually quantify humor.
You're thinking of electrons as little planet-like objects orbiting the nucleus. Our current best understanding is that they don't follow orbits exactly, so much as they occupy orbitals (volumes of space where you have 90%+ confidence that the electron can be found inside.) The problem with the superlarge nucleii is that for electrons in the innermost shell to avoid absorption, they need to be moving quickly... in the case of elements higher than atomic number 137, faster than the speed of light.)
Procrastination Man strikes again!