Posted on 10/16/2006 6:10:03 PM PDT by annie laurie
It's their inability to form meaningful relationships.
Who do these scientists think they are? Next thing they will be telling me that Pluto doesnt qualify to be a planet any more.
Element 118: hyperbushium. Half-life: 1 news cycle. After that, it decays to become an isotope of badiraqium mixed with radicals of dieboldium.
The fifth element was discovered in '97, named--Leeloo. :-)
Maybe but what are we going to make out of Element 114? Jewelry? It would be so expensive (without antimatter power) that it would almost be pointless to make.
It's kewl science though.
I'm still waiting for TriTitanium to be generated
new materials science
How do scientists produce a demoncrat?
Slam two turds together at hyperspeed and watch the crap fly.
"It's a mess," Moody says. "I fear at some level it puts all of us under suspicion."
Ya think !?!
Actually, I think plutonium occurs naturally in trace amounts.
Or "transparent aluminum". That would be cool.
I'll take "admantium" or "naquadah"...
I propose that the new element be named "ratherion".
Heh. Interesting. Guess that answers the question posed in post 42 ;-)
tell that element to start using the treadmill.
interesting related story:
"In 1999 a group at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL) announced that by smashing krypton ions (8636Kr) into a lead (20882Pb) target they had successfully created element 118 (293118UUo). As groups around the world sought to replicate these results and found that they were not able to, ununoctium's existence came into doubt. In 2001 LBNL issued a formal retraction of the results saying that a scientist on the team, Victor Ninov, had falsified data, and that they had no evidence that element 118 was produced in their lab. However, the story did not end there. As we have discussed here at NI in the past, you don't necessarily throw out ideas if data is falsified. Other teams pressed on in the search for super heavy elements. Last week it was announced that an experiment performed in 2002 did in fact, produce element 118, an entire atom's worth! A subsequent experiment carried out in 2005 did even better, producing two atoms of ununoctium."
Ununoctium is discovered... again... for real this time
October 16, 2006 @ 4:16PM - posted by Matt Ford
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2006/10/16/5635
Superheavy Discovery
by Arthur Fisher
116? 126? Remember those numbers? They may very well be the first naturally occurring superheavy elements to be discovered. And if the evidence for their existence is confirmed, it will herald a new and tremendously exciting era in nuclear physics.
To date, the heaviest element found in nature has been uranium, number 92 (the atomic number of an element equals the number of protons in the nucles of one of its atoms). Using particle accelerators ("atom smashers"), physicists have been able to create 14 man-made elements, from 93 to 106, including plutonium, a possible fuel for nuclear reactors. But these transuranium elements are radioactively unstable, and most are relatively short-lived. Many scientists have therefore believed it would be impossible to find any superheavy elements in nature, since, during the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system -- and probably a long time ago -- they would have degenerated into lighter, simpler elements.
Some nuclear scientists, however, postulated the existence of a so-called "island of stability" around element 114. Elements here, they thought, might be stable and thus longer-lived.
Now an experiment performed by scientists at Florida State University's Tandem Accelerator Laboratory has tentatively proved that such elements can be found. Moreover, they were found in rocks of great antiquity, indicating a long life span. The experiment climaxed a seven-year quest by Robert V. Gentry of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working under National Science Foundation and ERDA grants. He had been trying to explain the origins of large rings of radiation damage -- called "giant halos" -- around tiny crystals found in ancient rocks. The radioactivity needed to produce such damage seemed to be greater than that given off by natural radioactive elements --- such as uranium -- found in the earth.
The Florida State experiment that apparently solved the mystery was designed by a team of scientists at the University of California at Davis. They reasoned that an analytical technique originally developed to detect air pollutants could be applied to the puzzling crystals. At Florida State, the crystals were bombarded by intense proton beams from a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator. Atoms inside the crystals became "excited" -- boosted to a higher energy state -- and then emitted X rays. Each element, so stimulated, will emit a pattern of X rays so characteristic that it represents a unique "signature," readily identifiable by experts. And amounts the signatures gleefully read by the experimenters were ones identical to those earlier predicted for elements 116 and 126 by physicists at Oak Ridge. They also found weaker evidence for traces of elements 114 and 124. A hunt for other natural superheavy elements is now sure to follow.
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