Slashdot Mirror
Periodic Table Gets a New, Unnamed Element
koavf writes "More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of 'super-heavy' element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as 'ununbi' means 'one one two' in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name." Slashdotium? Taconium? Man, I shoulda gone into science so I could have named something sweet that kids have to memorize in classes.
^ As one article puts it, referring to information Seaborg gave in a talk: "The obvious choice for the symbol would have been Pl, but facetiously, Seaborg suggested Pu, like the words a child would exclaim, 'Pee-yoo!' when smelling something bad. Seaborg thought that he would receive a great deal of flak over that suggestion, but the naming committee accepted the symbol without a word." Clark, David L.; Hobart, David E. (2000). "Reflections on the Legacy of a Legend: Glenn T. Seaborg, 1912â"1999" (PDF). Los Alamos Science 26: 56â"61, on 57. Retrieved on 2009-02-15 http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00818011.pdf
Apart from BEER, humanity itself, controlled fire, language (probably), sterilisation of food and water, the world's tallest building (a pyramid) until recently, the roots of most modern popular music genres, airmail (by homing pigeon), the pendulum, the tunnel boring machine, stone tools, knives, pigments, burial, housing, bread, plywood, cement, river boats, sutures, the aqueduct, candles, glass, the water clock, toothpaste, metal block printing, coffee, the astrolabe, the ventilator, explosive gunpowder, the cannon, handguns, cartridges, heart transplants, the CAT scanner, ....
You mean, apart for all that?
Read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. He very clearly outlines why development was accelerated in some regions and not others.
What's interesting about this kind of thing is that it's getting very close to the island of stability, which is a predicted set of heavy elements that would be stable with respect to fission. What they made is Z=112 (number of protons) and N=165 (number of neutrons), which is a little on the neutron-deficient side of the island in the WP article's chart. If you want to go nuts with far-future scientific extrapolation, it's conceivable that if you could make the isotopes on the actual island of stability, you could actually have macroscopic quantities of the stuff. It would probably be extremely susceptible to neutron-induced fission, so you could probably make a nuclear bomb the size of a pencil eraser. Arms control would get really tough! So maybe it's fortunate that there are extremely difficult technical problems to be solved before we can get there.
To a nuclear physicist, what's more interesting about this kind of thing is that it's a sensitive test of models of nuclear forces and models of the many-body problem. The strong nuclear force isn't like gravity and electromagnetism, which are simple 1/r^2 forces; it doesn't have simple mathematical behavior, and all we have are approximations to its behavior. Also, many-body problems -- even classical many-body problems -- are really tough.
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Isotopes and atoms are the same thing in nature, the difference in terms is that you use isotope for atoms of the same element with a different atomic mass. So if a chemical element only has one isotope and that it's radioactive then it's correct to claim that an atom has a half life.
You just got troll'd!