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Comments: 142 +- Science: Element 114 Verified on Tuesday October 20, @09:00PM
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by
kdawson
on Tuesday October 20, @09:00PM
from the cento-do-deco-quaternium dept.
from the cento-do-deco-quaternium dept.
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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."
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The Russians found it? (Score:5, Funny)
126 is Kryptonite (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
114? Wow man... (Score:2, Funny)
That's HEAVY.
Re:114? Wow man... (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Parent
just great. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:just great. (Score:5, Funny)
...yes, that's why it's called a periodic table: every now and then you need to replace it. Otherwise it would have been called a permanent table. :)
Parent
Re:just great. (Score:5, Funny)
...yes, that's why it's called a periodic table: every now and then you need to replace it. Otherwise it would have been called a permanent table. :)
No, it's because some people get all PMSey when you change one little thing.
Parent
Re:just great. (Score:5, Funny)
Here ya go. [cslacker.com] This one's guaranteed to never need updating. :)
Parent
But what about Element 115? (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Damn I loved that game. Link [xcomufo.com] for those of you who don't get the joke, now go play it in DOSbox.
Odd (Score:2, Informative)
Why cheat? (Score:2)
Didn't the team that falsified the info about 114 and 116 come from Lawrence Livermoore
What is the chain of thought that leads researchers to that level of fraud? Eventual exposure and disgrace is always the most likely outcome.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but until the exposure and disgrace the get to use their new found Science Street Cred and massive fame and accompanying financial rewards to score with uber-hot Science Groupies.
Right?
Um... fabricated? (Score:2)
Such independent verification is important, particularly given the evidence of fabricated results for other superheavy elements.
Unfortunately, the article that story is pointing to claiming that it was fraud rather than error has expired from Yahoo's site. Do you have a better link?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks, I found more details in this paper [ucdavis.edu].
Finally! (Score:2)
About time! (SF prediction) (Score:3, Interesting)
An old Poul Anderson story, Mirkheim, used a stable superheavy element, eka-platinum, as a Maguffin.
In the novel, the stuff was produced in a supernova. A gas giant planet was walloped by the explosion, blowing away its atmosphere leaving a creamy nougat center very dense rocky core. The heavy elements produced by the supernova were plastered across its surface.
As I recall, the planet's discovery by the galaxy's great powers caused a political crisis and the threat of war. The stuff was highly valued. The one use I recall was a hull plating used by hydrogen-breathing races.
Elerium (Score:2, Funny)
One more to go till we get Elerium-115 [wikipedia.org].
Don't tell the terrorists (Score:2, Funny)
I hear element 114 is highly radioactive.
A human element (ha!) (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [lbl.gov]); 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 [berkeley.edu].
Hey let's put it in the LHC (Score:5, Funny)
Hey let's put it in the LHC and see what hap(&(*%&* NO CARRIER.
Elements Song (Score:3, Funny)
Upon reading the headline, my first thought was "dammit, now Tom Lehrer's Elements Song [wikipedia.org] is even further behind."
in soviet russia (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why the need to 'discover' the elements? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In theory wouldn't anti-helium be more stable than anti-hydrogen. It being a noble anti-gas and all that.
Chemically, yes, anti-helium would be more inert than anti-hydrogen. Mutual annihilation isn't a chemical reaction, though.
Re: (Score:2)
First of all I'm not sure what you mean by formula, and as for the basic properties, they mostly all come down to the half-life.
Re:Why the need to 'discover' the elements? (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Parent
Re:Why the need to 'discover' the elements? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Leave both in a vacuum and see which one lasts longer. There's a very clear definition of atomic stability that is markedly different from chemical reactivity.
Re:Why the need to 'discover' the elements? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Some isotopes of them might be stable. The properties of these stable isotopes might be desirable. Imagine if we found an exotic super-heavy element that was stable and easy to fission? We might be able to work it into the nuclear reprocessing chain and squeeze some more energy out.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah you might be able to make Helium fuse. I can't wait. On the upside I probably wouldn't see it coming.
Re:And why is this important? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:And why is this important? (Score:5, Funny)
Why do you think people are searching for very large prime numbers?
The nookie.. obviously.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's why I want to be a mathematician. For the ladies!
They love it when I integrate with them. And months after that, we'll derive!
And years later, we'll try to figure out why nothing has changed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Those "islands of stability" have been predicted long time ago. What I don't understand is why those researchers do not try to make those elements, instead of the intermediate ones.
Afaik making those superheavy elements is done by fusing lighter ones. Not by building them up brick-by-brick (or proton/neutron by proton/neutron). So I wonder why not just go for the ones that are predicted to be more stable? Is there something we need to know from slightly-less-heavy elements that we can't predict before maki
Re:And why is this important? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:And why is this important? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, assuming you are talking about RSA, neither the private key nor the public key is the pair of primes or the product of the primes. The product of the primes is used with both the private and public keys, and the other part of the keys are two related exponents, one made public and one kept private.
Re:And why is this important? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
So why don't we see those stable elements in nature?
Re: (Score:2)
Just because we don't find them in earth-bound surface-accessible "nature" doesn't mean they don't exist somewhere in the universe - perhaps somewhere out there was a heavier supernova that produced element 114 or higher.
Re:And why is this important? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:And why is this important? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps the same reason we don't see astronomically common stable elements like Tellerium.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellurium [wikipedia.org]:
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.
Parent
Re:And why is this important? (Score:5, Informative)
---
Nuclear Power [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
Parent
Re:Pics or it didn't happen. (Score:4, Funny)
And if ya' got some time, how about some unobtainium?
You can get pics of hot girls through an easy google image search.
Parent
Re:What about (Score:3, Informative)
elerium-115?
I thought the official name of element 115 was Ununpentium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ununpentium [wikipedia.org]
It's listed as Uup on a Dept of Navy periodic chart that was issued in the 1990s.
Robert Lazar discusses applications of Element 115 at his web site: http://www.boblazar.com/closed/gravity.htm [boblazar.com]