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Comments: 461 +- News: Periodic Table Gets a New, Unnamed Element on Thursday June 11, @09:37AM
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koavf writes "More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of 'super-heavy' element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as 'ununbi' means 'one one two' in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name." Slashdotium? Taconium? Man, I shoulda gone into science so I could have named something sweet that kids have to memorize in classes.
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It's so obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Colbertium
Re:It's so obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Rhymes with Barium? That'll be a boon for Tom Lehrer...
Parent
Re:It's so obvious (Score:5, Funny)
That'll be a boon for Tom Lehrer...
First you get your mod points spent
Then you name the element
Which the trolls will then lament
Then you rant then you rant then you rant
Then for real fun
Use a good pun
Give it real class! Name it TommyLeherium!
Parent
Re:It's so obvious (Score:5, Funny)
I disagree.
It is an unstable, short-lived element. I vote cowboynealium!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
On top of that, it's a heavy element as well. Cowboynealium is perfect.
Re:It's so obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Windowsium?
Parent
What have the Africans ever done for us? (Score:5, Informative)
Apart from BEER, humanity itself, controlled fire, language (probably), sterilisation of food and water, the world's tallest building (a pyramid) until recently, the roots of most modern popular music genres, airmail (by homing pigeon), the pendulum, the tunnel boring machine, stone tools, knives, pigments, burial, housing, bread, plywood, cement, river boats, sutures, the aqueduct, candles, glass, the water clock, toothpaste, metal block printing, coffee, the astrolabe, the ventilator, explosive gunpowder, the cannon, handguns, cartridges, heart transplants, the CAT scanner, ....
You mean, apart for all that?
Parent
Re:What have the Africans ever done for us? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:What have the Africans ever done for us? (Score:5, Informative)
Egypt is geographically African, and that's enough.
Who said anything about the Nile? The Egyptians had sophisticated irrigation systems. [wikipedia.org]
Another thing we can credit to Egyptians, and thus to Africa, is antibiotics:
Antibiotics are compounds produced by bacteria and fungi which are capable of killing, or inhibiting, competing microbial species. This phenomenon has long been known; it may explain why the ancient Egyptians had the practice of applying a poultice of moldy bread to infected wounds.
http://acswebcontent.acs.org/landmarks/landmarks/penicillin/discover.html [acs.org]
Parent
So your obviously a racist troll, but anyway... (Score:4, Interesting)
The first car. I think a frenchman was actually the first, but the real innovation was Henry Ford's mass production assembly line, not the automobile itself.
Calculus. Leibniz and Newton are not co-inventors - not really anyway. Basically they both built on work done by others including al-Haythem and other decidedly non-German mathematicians. The difference is that Newton did something truly amazing (and innovative) with it.
Quantum physics. As you say 'developed part of the foundation.' Quantum theory developed gradually, with contributions of a lot of people from a lot of places. It was not like Einstein's theory of relativity, which was a real breakthrough (although it too relied on the field equations of Maxwell (an Englishman) and other past theories. Einstein was from Austria by the way.
So all your examples are sort of 'me too' or 'i helped out' innovations. You would be better off to look at the French (Curie, Pasteur, or even Descartes). Or the English (Darwin, Newton). Or the Italians (Galileo, Marconi, etc.). And I am just picking a few of the bigs from Europe (since I am not readily familiar with the history of science outside the western world - my bad).
And lets not forget the Americans. There is no ethnic identity associated with being American, but one could argue that is their strength - the mixing together of scientists who hail from all parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds and ways of thinking about life the universe and everything.
So to bring it down to your level, what have the Germans really innovated, uniquely and on their own? How to start (and loose) two world wars? How to best gas Jewish people?
But seriously, the Germans have made great contributions to science and technology. That can not be ignored. But not more than many other nations. They are about par for the course.
Parent
Re:So your obviously a racist troll, but anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why dont you say what you really mean?
Fine, I'm a little bit better than the rest of you slackers.
Happy now?
Re:Serious Question: Why do Germans outperform? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Serious Question: Why do Germans outperform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, first of all, I haven't read "Carnage and Culture". But I just looked at the Amazon summary [amazon.com], and I don't think it refutes "Guns, Germs, and Steel" at all.
First of all, Europeans got their asses handed to them from about 300CE to the 1480s. The Germans sacked Rome again and again, so viciously that our word "Vandal" comes from the name of one of the Germanic tribes involved. A few hundred years after the Western Empire finally collapsed, the Muslims handily conquered the Iberian Peninsula (on which Spain and Portugal reside today) and reduced the Byzantine Empire to a remnant centered on Constantinople (tellingly, Istanbul today). The only two things that stopped Muslims overrunning Europe were:
This bare survival doesn't indicate European military superiority. Instead, it reveal a fundamental weakness that nearly led to the end of our civilization.
Europeans armies weren't anything special until the Renaissance. Don't forget how we were utterly defeated time and again in the Crusades, or how Western European armies decided to sack Constantinople (greatly weakening the only thing between the Islamic world and Western Europe) because the holy land was too tough. The Chinese had a great professional military as well, and don't forget where Sun Tzu hails from.
And how can we discuss European military weakness without invoking Ghengis Khan, the barbarian who nearly destroyed Europe again. He overran Russia and penetrated all the way to Vienna before being stopped. The idea mentioned in the summary that European armies were particularly ruthless is obviously bunk: Genghis Khan had entire cities impaled. There just wasn't anything particularly exceptional about European armies.
Yes, the Europeans armies later become practically invincible, but only due to cultural changes and competition among martial nation-states. Europe's later military superiority was not an inherent property of Europeans, but instead was a result of the same forces that Diamond details in "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
Parent
Re:Serious Question: Why do Germans outperform? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Serious Question: Why do Germans outperform? (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone get rid of the troll mod on this. It's not an unreasonable question, and it's asked in about the most politically correct language manageable for such a charged issue.
The truth is that the scientific and technical advances don't come at random, but are dependent on a range of societal factors. China has one of the largest populations of any countries on earth, yet many much smaller countries produce far more scientific advances per capita. This is clearly not a genetic issue - the Chinese are dramatically disproportionately represented in the sciences in the US, but their society isn't managed in a way that's conducive to training the independent thinking skills needed to do the best science. Go back a few centuries though, and China was the most sophisticated and advanced civilization in the world.
I'm not passing value judgements here, every civilization has it's own strengths and weaknesses, but the sort of mindless PC attitude that mods such a reasonable and polite question as trolling really shouldn't be tolerated.
The parent post (and probably mine as well) could very reasonably be modded off-topic however!
Parent
Re:Serious Question: Why do Germans outperform? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a TED talk by Hans Rosling which demonstrates Africa is actually making insanely rapid progress, but it isn't apparent to us because they started at so far behind.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html [ted.com]
Parent
Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Best name ever (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Best name ever (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Best name ever (Score:5, Funny)
Unobtainium
... also known as element 404.
Parent
Interesting Fact (Score:5, Interesting)
The natural abbreviation for Plutonium is Pl, which was free since Platinum uses Pt. One of the discoverers, Glenn Seaborg, thought it would be funny to submit it with the abbreviation Pu. He figured the joke would be noticed and the abbreviation changed, but it never happened.
Re:Interesting Fact (Score:5, Funny)
In the early days of nuke research, a number of physicists picked up dosages of plutonium that worried the AEC, so it instituted a program of measuring the Pu content of their urine once a year ad infinitum and monitoring for health effects. Those people refer to themselves as the IPPU Club...
rj
Parent
Re:Interesting Fact (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
assuming a trend (Score:5, Interesting)
Due to the atomic number 112 I recommend Fibonaccium, after the Fibonacci sequence which adds the 2 preceding numbers to find the next in sequence.
Re:assuming a trend (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
too long. How about Hernium?
Re:assuming a trend (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Good News Everyone! (Score:5, Funny)
Old school. (Score:5, Funny)
Just give up (Score:5, Funny)
It's going to be something like: BankofAmericaElementium
A semantic quibble about these things (rant?) (Score:5, Interesting)
A nucleus with a half-life measured in milliseconds or smaller doesn't seem to qualify, at least in my sort of language-to-thought translator, as really as an "element". That word carries with it the connotation of actual material existence which seems incompatible with its inability to actually exist for any period of time on the human scale.
I freely admit this is a quibble, but this sort of thing bugs me. Yes, IAAP and this rant has no bearing whatsoever on the scientific merits of the research (not my field, so I'll pass on that) and is just about the naming.
Re:A semantic quibble about these things (rant?) (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
rj
Re:A semantic quibble about these things (rant?) (Score:4, Informative)
Isotopes and atoms are the same thing in nature, the difference in terms is that you use isotope for atoms of the same element with a different atomic mass. So if a chemical element only has one isotope and that it's radioactive then it's correct to claim that an atom has a half life.
Parent
Re:A semantic quibble about these things (rant?) (Score:5, Insightful)
So whats the time?
Everything on the periodic tables will fade after a time.
Is it a millisecond? a full second? a year? million years?
Parent
Re:A semantic quibble about these things (rant?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
all hail.... (Score:4, Funny)
The (Score:5, Funny)
"Element formerly known as ununb"i. And give it some funky symbol
the discovery was announced at a meeting (Score:5, Funny)
in a large hall previously devoted to gymnastics
so i propose gymnasium, auditorium, or symposium
Emergentium (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Emergentium (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Once the news reaches Harvard... (Score:5, Funny)
Lehrerium!
elem 112 (Score:5, Funny)
Hundredandtwelvium
island of stability (Score:5, Informative)
What's interesting about this kind of thing is that it's getting very close to the island of stability [wikipedia.org], which is a predicted set of heavy elements that would be stable with respect to fission. What they made is Z=112 (number of protons) and N=165 (number of neutrons), which is a little on the neutron-deficient side of the island in the WP article's chart. If you want to go nuts with far-future scientific extrapolation, it's conceivable that if you could make the isotopes on the actual island of stability, you could actually have macroscopic quantities of the stuff. It would probably be extremely susceptible to neutron-induced fission, so you could probably make a nuclear bomb the size of a pencil eraser. Arms control would get really tough! So maybe it's fortunate that there are extremely difficult technical problems [wikipedia.org] to be solved before we can get there.
To a nuclear physicist, what's more interesting about this kind of thing is that it's a sensitive test of models of nuclear forces and models of the many-body problem. The strong nuclear force isn't like gravity and electromagnetism, which are simple 1/r^2 forces; it doesn't have simple mathematical behavior, and all we have are approximations to its behavior. Also, many-body problems -- even classical many-body problems -- are really tough.
Element 112 (Score:4, Insightful)
Well since there is Uranium, neptunium and plutonium, why not call this one Jupiterium
116 comment and no one mentioned this? (Score:5, Funny)
Tiberium!
Now its just a matter of time before the rise of nod.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody is Going to Chance a Vote (Score:3, Funny)
We've just received word that the Oval Office has mandated the new element be called "Obamanium." That whole voting thing is so-o-o-o-o-o 2008 Democratic Republic...