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Element 114 Verified
ExRex writes "A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has observed the production of superheavy element 114, confirming the results of researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. Those researchers first reported producing element 114 in 1999. Such independent verification is important, particularly given the evidence of fabricated results for other superheavy elements. If you're a subscriber to Physical Review Letters, you can download the full article."
Mr. President, we cannot allow an Element 114 gap!
now i need a new periodic table
Well, as far as Sig's go, Freud was a doozy.
Fine, fine, element 114 has been verified. Now, if they could just get a move on with element 115, we could make our UFO Power Sources work and finally get those Firestorms into the air. We're practically defenseless against the sectoids!
mostly because the fun information these days isn't related to the number of electrons but how stable the atoms are, which helps theories that describe how stable the elements should be to be verified.
A variety of reasons. First of all, because it is interesting and fun. Why do you think people are searching for very large prime numbers? http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/15/154227/12M-Digit-Prime-Number-Sets-Record-Nets-100000 Do you think they are all doing this because of possible benefits to abstract areas of number theory any more than people climb Everest for practical reasons? Second, seeing that these elements match up to our predictions help us get a better understanding of physics. Third, there is some reason to suspect that there may be farther ahead islands of stability where the elements become more stable again. While it is unlikely that those areas are stable enough for those elements to live long enough to be of practical use, the chance otherwise is not tiny. So there may be direct practical benefits. But the main reasons are because it is cool and humans are ever curious creatures.
Well, the closer we can get to finding an island of stability, the better.
Why do you think people are searching for very large prime numbers?
The nookie.. obviously.
I record my sleeptalking
So you would think but not really. The sort of very large primes found that I linked to uses a highly specialized algorithm. It only finds primes of the form 2^n-1 which are very rare and also generally much too large to use in practical crypto. You are welcome to make your private key the product of two large Mersenne primes. The rest of us would rather use randomly selected primes of a few hundred digits.
Perhaps the same reason we don't see astronomically common stable elements like Tellerium.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellurium:
The extreme rarity of tellurium in the Earth's crust is not a reflection of its cosmic abundance, which is in fact greater than that of rubidium, even though rubidium is ten thousand times more abundant in the Earth's crust. The extraordinarily low abundance of tellurium on Earth is because during the Earth's formation, the stable form of elements in the absence of oxygen and water was controlled by the oxidation and reduction of hydrogen. Under this scenario elements such as tellurium which form volatile hydrides were severely depleted during the formation of the Earth's crust through evaporation. Tellurium and selenium are the heavy elements mostly depleted in the Earth's crust by this process.
I was pleased to read that Heino Nitsche is one of the project's lead researchers. His general chemistry course at Berkeley was very informative and enjoyable (and not just because he has a German accent and glorious mad scientist mustache); I've yet to meet someone who can get that excited about chemistry at 9 a.m. :)
I still remember a story he told us during the unit on radioactivity and nuclear decay. One of his cats, sick with cancer, was treated with radioactive I-131. After the cat "cooled off" at the vet hospital, Heino took him home, nursed him back to health, and, like a true scientist, measured the cat's radioactivity every morning with a Geiger counter. Sure enough, the measured decay curve strongly matched the predicted one. The cat lived for several more years, too.
If you want a brief overview of the history of heavy element synthesis, especially as it pertains to Berkeley, check out his lecture (47) on the subject.
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Nuclear Power Feed @ Feed Distiller
Well it's not like they're purposely missing the target here... They've tried to make isotopes with a higher n/p ratio near the island of stability it's just that it's hard to find two high n/p isotopes to smash together to make a larger one. As you go toward higher elements the n/p ratio needs to be larger to afford more stable isotopes. This means that you'd effectively need to smash two isotopes together that have n/p ratios ideal for higher elements but markedly unstable for lower elements. THen there's the problem that when you smash two isotopes together to make these higher elements, it often knocks out a few neutrons from the composite nucleus due to the sheer high energies involved. This means that you'd probably have to use lower isotopes that have even higher n/p ratios that just don't last very long. (they're very unstable) Of course you'd think that you could just keep adding neutrons or tritium nuclei repeatedly to get higher elements but that doesn't work either as it usually ends up causing a fission reaction. In fact, the vast majority of any reactions attempted so far to produce higher elements has resulted in an inordinate number of composite nuclei undergoing fission immediately. Out of 10^12 reactions, you'd be fairly lucky to find one of them actually producing an isotope of a higher element.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
You know! The FORMULA:
You put some protons in,
and pull some neutrons out,
then you toss in some electrons,
and you shake it all about.
You publish real quick just in case your funding is in doubt.
And that's what it's all about!
Tip your waitpeople, I'll be here all week!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Hey let's put it in the LHC and see what hap(&(*%&* NO CARRIER.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Iron Oxide is not the degradation of the iron atom but the binding of the molecule to Oxygen. In fact, nuclei of the iron atom has one of the highest binding energies per nucleon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg
To the right of the apex in the chart above, fission is the process to release energy. To the left of the apex, fusion. At the apex, one of the elements you will find is iron. To make a long story short, this chart is one of the reasons why you find iron cores in stars.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
That's HEAVY.
There's that word again; "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!