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Posted on 04/01/2010 6:31:04 PM PDT by smokingfrog
BERKELEY, CA Discovery of two new "superheavy" elements has been announced by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Element 120 and its immediate decay product, element 121, were discovered at Berkeley Lab's 88-Inch Cyclotron by bombarding targets of lead with an intense beam of high-energy krypton ions. Although both new elements almost instantly decay into other elements, the sequence of decay events is consistent with theories that have long predicted an "island of stability" for nuclei with approximately 187 protons and 199 neutrons.
"We jumped over a sea of instability onto an island of stability that theories have been predicting since the 1970s," said nuclear physicist Victor Nokof who was first author of a paper that has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.
Said Don Otoberich, a nuclear chemist who led the discovery team, "We were able to produce these superheavies using a reaction that, until a few months ago, we had not considered using. However, theoretician Jimmy Neecriket (a visiting Fulbright scholar from the Soltan Institute for Nuclear Studies in Poland) calculated that this reaction should have particularly favorable production rates. Our unexpected success in producing these superheavy elements opens up a whole world of possibilities using similar reactions: new elements and isotopes, tests of nuclear stability and mass models, and a new understanding of nuclear reactions for the production of heavy elements."
(Excerpt) Read more at lbl.gov ...
Poor soul suffers from little dick syndrome ... without braille, he would never be able to pee standing up.
the sequence of decay events is consistent with theories that have long predicted an "island of stability" for nuclei with approximately 187 protons and 199 neutrons.
"We jumped over a sea of instability onto an island of stability that theories have been predicting since the 1970s," said nuclear physicist Victor Nokof
Something doesn't make sense here because:
1. They are talking about elements 120 and 121 being near the "island of stability", but an element with 187 protons would be element 187.
2. The heavier elements all have many more neutrons than protons
Mmmm. You would think that a nuclear physicist would know that. Maybe this Nokov fellow isn't who he says he is...
See #23.
It’s an April Fool’s joke. Jimmy Neecricket?
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