Periodic Table To Welcome Two New Elements 157
adeelarshad82 writes "Chemistry's periodic table can soon welcome livermorium and flerovium, two newly named elements, which were announced Thursday (Dec. 1) by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The new names will undergo a five-month public comment period before the official paperwork gets processed and they show up on the table. Three other new elements just recently finished this process, filling in the 110, 111 and 112 spots."
Rejected again! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rejected again! (Score:4, Funny)
Hasbeenium?
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This comment saddens me.
Re:Rejected again! (Score:5, Funny)
Or Roadrunnium, because it has a half life so fast you won't be able to catch it.
Re:Rejected again! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course after Roadrunnium, we need Wileeum and Coyotium, though it'll be unwise to put either of those in the vicinity of the highly unstable Ajaxium.
The proximity of either Eileeium or Coyotium with Ajaxium is known to create a localized reality nullification field, and we all know how much serious scientists hates it when reality stops taking them seriously, and starts making or changing it's own rules.
Re:Rejected again! (Score:5, Informative)
It's Acmeium, not Ajaxium.
Re:Rejected again! (Score:4, Funny)
Strange.
I've read comment threads where name droppping Stephen Colbert makes you look like a genius compared to everyone else posting, and here we have a context where name dropping Stephen Colbert makes you look like an idiot.
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But what you look like will be unknown until the event is actually observed.
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Will they ever name an element Colbertium, after Stephen T. Colbert, DFA?
Insovietrussiaelementnamesyounium
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Warning. Soviet Russia jokes are now being used in 'hip and on the pulse' radio adverts. It is time to stop using it now. It has lost its funny (In Soviet Russia, its funny loses YOU!).
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I dunno, but they really should keep 111 as unununium. It just sounds too damn funny to discard.
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Dilbertium?
Large non metallic element, has an affinity for anything silicon. Has a half-life of 30 years. Found mostly in IT departments and university research labs.
Livermorium stinks (Score:1)
Anything but that!
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What were the scientists thinking?
I bet they were thinking, "Hey let's name it after the town [llnl.gov] in which we work.
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Is flerovium some breed of onion?
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Is flerovium some breed of onion?
Sounds like the latest artificial sweetner or food additive .. but I'm being culturally insensitive.
Do these people ever have fun? How about Unobtanium?
When does comment period begin for Element 115? (Score:3, Funny)
I have a number of people to coordinate in order to make sure it ends up with the name Elerium.
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I'll join your quest to make element 115 Elerium.
Personally though, I'm looking forward to Unobtainium becoming official.
Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:4, Informative)
Were these stable elements - or did they exist as a product of some super-collision for fractions of a second?
Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:5, Informative)
FTA - "All five of these elements are so large and unstable they can be made only in the lab, and they fall apart into other elements very quickly. Not much is known about these elements, since they aren't stable enough to do experiments on and are not found in nature."
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By this definition aren't, how can they be classified as elements? Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further." If these elements are breaking down into other elements..wtf?
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Wow I mangled that post. Why isn't my brain functioning today?
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LOL -- Give it another shot, Tiger. ;)
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Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further." If these elements are breaking down into other elements..wtf?
By that definition, there are no elements other than hydrogen. Any atom can be split, given enough energy, into atoms of other elements, except for the proton, which can be pulverized, but the products are not another element.
Otherwise, I would agree. Any element with a half-life so short should be considered an intermediate reaction product, not an element.
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Those are not "atoms of other elements".
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Uranium does this too (over ever so slightly larger time scales...) - it is not an element?
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Short answer: your elementary education was wrong.
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It's true (Score:2)
"Elements cannot be broken down any further." Which is true but only half the story. "Because if they do, then they become something else." is the other half of the story.
These gigantic atoms are unstable. You can make them but they quickly fall apart into the things they were made of. Like a house of cards in a windy room.
The research teams are taking large atoms and firing them at other large atoms to make these gigantic atoms. They only last for a few moments before they fall back apart into the
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When did you go to school? The 1800s?
Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:5, Funny)
Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further."
It's always nice to run into a fellow member of the Class of 1827 here on /.
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Molecules are the smallest building blocks in physics, which are built out of elements.
Elements are the smallest building blocks in physics, which are built out of atomic particles.
Atomic particles are the smallest building blocks in physics, which are built out of quarks.
Quarks are the smallest building blocks in physics, which are built out of scientific papers.
Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:4, Funny)
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By this definition aren't, how can they be classified as elements? Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further." If these elements are breaking down into other elements..wtf?
What school was this? And in what country?
Protons and Electrons were discovered just before the year 1900, by Ernest Rutherford.
Neutrons were theorized then discovered two and three decades later respectively.
As long ago as 1945 was the first nuclear warhead testing detonation, which pretty much proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that atoms of elements can be split into smaller things. It made a news paper or two I think.
Anyone attempting to claim otherwise (Your school and teacher(s) included) is so emb
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They breakdown into other elements? Uranium can become gold?
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No, but it does become plutonium.
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No, gold is not one of the decay products of uranium. Lead, however, most certainly is. read. [wikipedia.org]
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An element consists of only one kind of atom, cannot be broken down into a simpler type of matter by either physical or chemical means, and can exist as either atoms (e.g. argon) or molecules (e.g., nitrogen).
Uranium can't become gold; it does decay to lead, however.
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They break down into other elements, but Uranium's decay series never passes through gold:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain#Radium_series_.28also_known_as_uranium_series.29 [wikipedia.org]
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No, nervous wrecks. [eyeroll]
Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem probably comes from several parts. Mostly, the 'Atom', which came from Greek 'atomos': something that couldn't be made any smaller. It was the basic 'element' forming everything else, the building blocks of the universe.
What was stated to be indivisible was found to be: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Those things that made up atoms... thus proved that we COULD cut the uncutable. And now those three parts are being subdivided further, into quarks.
So it isn't exactly that elements are indivisible. It's just that the myriad of parts making them up (Protons, Neutrons, and that cloud of Electrons hovering around the nucleus) may change, with some of the changes drastically affecting the element enough that it's no longer what it is; the cases of elements like Uranium breaking down and becoming other elements is what happens with nuclear reactors (with us just harvesting the heat byproduct to make steam to turn turbines to generate electricity). The reverse can happen; combine two elements (say... Hydrogen) and fuse them together, and you can end up with a different element (Helium, among others). Same principle; the 'divisible' parts of the atoms are pushed together so that their nuclei join, and now the new single element changes with its new contents.
The interesting thing will be how long it'll take to divide quarks into even smaller bits of 'something'... and whether it's turtles all the way down.
Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:5, Interesting)
Allow me, then.
If you define an element as something that "cannot be broken down any further" you exclude anything that decays into lighter elements, such as uranium or radium. You also exclude substances that can be induced to break down through various means.
However, it's not a problem if you refine the definition slightly: an element is that which cannot be broken down chemically. You can't turn an atom of X into a lighter atom of Y just by mixing chemicals together in a beaker (no offence, chemists, I'm just trying to illustrate a point). Fire X through a particle accelerator hard enough, though, and sometimes it breaks apart into smaller/lighter pieces when it hits something.
Is that better?
Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's not better. It just punts the problem from the unclear definition of "element" to the unclear definition of "chemically"
Very well, I'll try again, though I suspect I'll fare no better.
"You can't turn an atom of X into a lighter atom of Y just by mixing chemicals together in a beaker"
I can make Uranium into Thorium by mixing two chemicals - Uranium and Uranium (and then waiting for the reaction to finish). Your definition needs to make it clear WHY this is not a chemical reaction.
You can't make thorium from uranium by mixing it with more uranium. The uranium would decay anyway; you wouldn't have actually done anything to bring about the change. Perhaps it's just semantics but this is equivalent to saying you can make a hammer fall when you drop it by saying the magic word when you let go.
We arbitrarily draw a line between "chemical" events and "nuclear" events based on what particles are involved, what they're doing, and so on. But it's still an aribitrary destinction created by humans and there are still oddball situations that straddle the line.
I'm neither a physicist nor a chemist but I was taught that chemical reactions are all about interactions between atoms' electrons and that such interactions don't give rise to changes in the nucleus. I'm happy to be corrected on this point, and I'd be very happy to hear about the line-straddling situations you mention.
Some things just aren't made of atoms in the usual sense. There's positronium, free neutrons, atoms with a bound muon, neutron stars...
Indeed. No argument there.
The superheavy atoms in TFA are a case where the usual definition of element is a bit weak, since their real-world behavior is nothing like that of stable elements.
I'm not going to dispute this either, but I would ask that you consider the atom's point of view. As someone once said (I regret the name escapes me) "[subatomic particles] operate on a different timescale; it may not look like much on my watch but it's eternity to them". Superheavy elements seem to behave very differently to us, but aren't they very much like 'normal' elements albeit with an extremely short half-life?
It might be wiser to redefine "element" in a way that specifically excludes them and call them something else instead, much like we redefined "planet" to exclude Pluto and Eris.
What definition do you suggest? I was merely trying to improve on the faulty one given by saying you can't change one element into another through chemistry.
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There's a bit more involved than just mixing.
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When did you hear this? We've known that atoms can be broken down since WW II (and somewhat before). I suspect that your instructors were not residents of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Island of stability (Score:2)
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Trouble is the ferry comes only one a week to that island and internet service is dial up only and they inhabitants have their own variant of burning man.
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The longest lived isotopes stay around for seconds.
Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:4, Informative)
An element is defined by the number of protons in the nucleus. Not by the number of protons in the nucleus that happen to stay together for a "long time (TBR)".
Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no stable transuranium elements.
Yet. Perhaps we will find a transuranium island of stability.
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Re:Real elements - or theoretical? (Score:4, Insightful)
We haven't found them yet because:
1) Making elements that large is really, really hard
2) Even if there exists an element with a half-life of, say, a few million years, it's been so long since the last supernova that finding one of them in nature would be impossible.
3) We're just now producing elements in the range where we might find more stable elements (according to current theory). These are exciting times, as we explore the boundaries of what we believe to be the island of stability.
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If the atomic number is greater than 92, you'll only find it in a lab for a fraction of a second at a time.
...for varying values of "a fraction of a second". Plutonium is transuranic, and it has a half-life measured in millennia.
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If the atomic number is greater than 92, you'll only find it in a lab for a fraction of a second at a time.
BULLSHIT
Elements 93 through 97 all have at least one isotope with a half life of over a thousand years. beyond that calafornium having a maximum half life of 898 years, Einstenium having a maximum half life of 471.7 days, fermium having a maximum half life of 100.5 days, mendelevium having a maximum half life of 51.5 days, with nobelium it's down to 58 minuites, lawrencium is back up to 3.6 hours and so on, it's not until Ununtrium (atomic number 113) that the half life of the most stable isotope drops belo
It's so nice to see... (Score:5, Funny)
this table is updated periodically.
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To be more specific, the periodic table can be thought of as a fungus. The elements are the mycelia of the fungus, and once in a while the table produces fruiting bodies (like mushrooms) that will produce spores for the periodic table to reproduce. It is these fruiting bodies that are the new elements. The spores will be released from these
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repeated at irregular intervals; intermittent: periodic outbreaks of the disease.
Link [reference.com]
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2. the definition you quote is down the list of accepted definitions. Especially for mathematic and scientific use, periodic means "happening or appearing at regular intervals". The general definition is
Re:It's so nice to see... (Score:4, Funny)
I imagine renaming it the sporadic table of the elements wouldn't go down too well with the academics.
Re:It's so nice to see... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, to be pedantic, it's not updated periodically -- that would imply that it gets updated on a regular basis with a predictable cycle. It's updated sporadically.
To be more specific, the periodic table can be thought of as a fungus. The elements are the mycelia of the fungus, and once in a while the table produces fruiting bodies (like mushrooms) that will produce spores for the periodic table to reproduce. It is these fruiting bodies that are the new elements. The spores will be released from these new elements when moisture and temperature conditions are right -- and with luck, a given spore may land upon the wall of another elementary school classroom and become a new periodic table of the elements.
Yet he still doesn't know why he isn't invited to parties.
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I don't know, he sounds like a fun guy...
Worse than Moland Springs. (Score:1)
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Livermorium, holy yuk!
Especially when I first read that as "liverandonionium".
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a) you're an idiot
b) the "-ium" suffix is used for pretty much everything else.
c) the discoverer of aluminium called it that first.
any word on element 0? (Score:2)
i was going to try some biotic implants
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Element 0 (neutron, no protons) is unstable with a half-life of approximately 10 mnutes.
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MASS EFFECT
play it on the x-box
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Yes, death is a very common result. But that depends on the amount of the element exposed.
Love potion? (Score:1)
I Lv U?
(slightly radioactive)
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Love hurts?
I see that these are atomic numbers 114 and 116 (Score:5, Interesting)
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The first part is named after a person or place of scientific significance, usually in the field of particle physics.
The -ium ending is pretty common for elements. Just look at some of the older entries on the periodic table, as you recommended: helium, lithium, beryllium, sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, gallium, germanium, selenium, rubidium, strontium, zirconium, molybdenum, palladium, cadmium, iridium, platinum.
Starktonium (Score:2)
I say we (Score:1)
I was holding out for.... (Score:2)
.... livermorium and onionium.
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No, that was just renamed to roentgenium. :p
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I think we all saw through that.
WOW (Score:1)
Thanks Science, (Score:2)
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Livermorium (Score:2)
I don't like liver. Can we call it "Liverlessium" instead?
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First encounters (Score:2)
Chemistry's periodic table can soon welcome livermorium and flerovium, two newly named elements
Welcome welcome! Would you like some Ti?
Octopussium (Score:3)
Always trying to take out Bond(s).
How about... (Score:1)
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Voldemortium?
I'm ok with it... (Score:3)
...so long as Plutonium remains classified an element.
Corny (Score:2)
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Anyone else think they sound like made-up names from really bad science fictions movies?
Treknobabble.
Waiting for Element 125 (Score:2)
I'm waiting for the magical, life-changing element #125, that should either be called Protonite, or Magicium -- because it will be.
theodore gray (Score:2)
morecowbellium (Score:2)
They need to include morecowbellium. How could they forget this lightweight, metallic element, which could be used to produce one of the most pleasant should in all the multiverse.
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most pleasant SOUNDS in all the multiverse.
Adobe Flerovium (Score:2)
I wonder if Adobe will object over the appropriation of their trademarked [Fl] icon by the periodic table?
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Obviously this isn't going to be in some widget you buy anytime soon, but I think the point was to test theories [wikipedia.org] relating to the field of physics [wikipedia.org]. It's basic research. How will it improve our lives? Nobody knows! Many of the things we use every day started the same way. Go hug a scientist today (but not for too long please).