Posted on 07/25/2024 9:27:52 AM PDT by AdmSmith
Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, announced today that they have for the first time used a beam of titanium to make a known superheavy element, livermorium — element 116. After upgrading the lab’s equipment, the team plans to use similar techniques to try to produce element 120. The heaviest element that has been made so far is oganesson, element 118, which was first synthesized in 2002.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
And it lasted for 6 femtoseconds before breaking apart . . .
j/k
I think
My first thought went to Bob Lazar and his claims of alien anti-gravity technology, including the then unknown “element-115”, that was used in these “spaceships”.
The same people who denied the existence of spaceships and element-115 also denied the existence of Area 51.
Since then, the US government admitted Area 51 exists and, in 2003, element-115 was synthesized by US and Russian scientists.
The only "original" elements were hydrogen, helium, and a smidge of lithium (atomic numbers 1, 2 & 3). All the other elements were created by stars fusing those three elements together under unimaginable heat and pressure to make heavier elements.
What these guys are doing is recreating the process that the stars run on in a laboratory and gluing together weird combinations that Mother Nature never intended or never got around to making.
The heaviest "natural" elements only could be created in the biggest explosions. When CSN&Y sang, "We are stardust," they weren't being hyperbolic.
* The subject of that clause is "one" (singular), not "elements" (plural) because the object of a preposition can never be the subject. Ergo they should have used the singular form, "does:" "A synthetic element is one of 24 known chemical elements that does not occur naturally on earth."
And its isotope with the longest half-life has a half-life less than 1 second.
Looks like steak to me! And, I like steak, Bob, even nearsighted steak, but I do not like it looking back at me!
Livermore too much like “More liver”. I think they could find a better name. (I know Lawrencium has been taken.)
Yawnium...
I wonder why they bother since these heavy elements break down so quickly.
Without physicists experimenting with transitional elements and studying the properties of semiconductors (”dirt effects” we call them), there would be no transistor, NOTHING of electronics as we have them today.
We would be stuck in a world of vacuum tubes forever. Oh, those would not be around either, because no one would have studied electron emission from heated metals (what’s the use of that, eh?).
And so on, and so forth. Clubs, not knives.
Will these super heavy elements pave a way to new technology? Unlikely, but having a broad base of scientists is a good thing, much better than welfare spending for example.
You don't know what the practical aspects of this research are. It might not have anything to do with the heavy element produced. Maybe its a new alloy created for the experiment, a new type of capacitor, etc.
When we spent a lot more in real dollars on fundamental research, we were the world leader not only in that research but in technology generally. I'd much rather we return there rather than concede first place to the Chinese.
Oh please. I used to work in microwave semiconductors and hybrid microelectronic circuits. This work is a far cry from research in transitional elements.
What you want is research money with no accountability. That kills wealth necessary to fund other more productive research.
I've been listening to that rationale for fifty years. Find it for me in Article I Section 8.
You don't know what the practical aspects of this research are.
Neither do you. I DO know what research into the soil microbiome or hydrology could yield, for example, at a pittance compared to this work involving high-dollar equipment.
There is a lot of research to do. It all costs money. We're broke. I want what is spent to foreseeably yield a profit with which to fund more research. It is knowable what the likelihood a particular project might yield within an acceptable time frame. When the elements under consideration are so ephemeral it is knowable how little.
Because we're broke.
I think it is a distinct element if has a different number of protons than any other element.
Shortest elemental half life is Astatine 213ml at 110 Nanoseconds. Hydrogen 7 is the shortest isotopic element half live of 10 to the minus 23 power seconds.
That is such a short time how can one know if the distinct subatomic particles are even associated? Seems more like they are just passing through the same space contemporaneously.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning in this way: “If such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do, in order to make one, is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!”
He did this and managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.
“It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium
There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium
There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium
And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium
There’s sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discovered!
and here is Martyn Poliakoff at Periodic Videos describing Element 120 - Periodic Table of Videos and the procedure to make it (Note this is from 2011 !) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1rYuslEQLs
This is as well worth the time Superheavy Elements: The End of the Periodic Table: Ken Moody, Chief Scientist for Radiochemistry, explains that recent discoveries of new elements have extended the periodic table beyond what was thought was possible, and demonstrates the existence of a collection of Superheavy Elements with unusual nuclear properties at the limits of stability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVqT-HRSoxI
...And there may be many others but they haven’t been discovahed.
Back in the 1970s there was a news story about possible detection of some stable elements in (what was at that time) a postulated island of stability in the mid-120s of the atomic numbers. The detection was in a piece of African mica, if memory serves. It'll have to serve, a web search turned up bupkis.
For those who just need a good laugh:
Ancient Aliens: Element 115 (Season 11, Episode 13)
History [sic] channel
13.7M subscribers
2,648,054 views
August 31, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oItffbIOgUQ
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