Periodic Table Gets a New, Unnamed Element 461
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.
Re:Interesting Fact (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A semantic quibble about these things (rant?) (Score:3, Informative)
rj
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?
Re:Serious Question: Why do Germans outperform? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Serious Question: Why do Germans outperform? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Trollinium (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of folks read mine. Hell, comments in it get moderated! [slashdot.org] Try Dork Side of the Moon [slashdot.org] or Sickness, pain, and death. And Star Trek [slashdot.org]. people have asked me to turn my old K5 "paxil Diaries" into a book and get it published.
Some of my journals are NSFW, [slashdot.org] which maybe explains why some folks like reading them...
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.
Re:What have the Africans ever done for us? (Score:3, Informative)
I have nothing against Africa, but your post is full of lies.
The earliest beer [wikipedia.org] comes from Mesopotamia and Egypt (which doesn't count, as it's culturally part of the Middle East).
Egypt doesn't count.
Dubious at best. The truth is that we have no idea what music sounded like before accurate musical notation came into widespread use during the Middle Ages [wikipedia.org].
The use of homing pigeons for communication was invented by several civilizations independently.
The Chinese were the first to employ the pendulum, and Galileo Galilei was the first to study their properties mathematically.
Have a source for this one? It's rather difficult to create a tunnel boring machine without at least a steam engine.
The Nile doesn't count.
Again, Egypt doesn't count. Alexandria counts even less, given its Hellenic character.
Everyone knows Gutenberg invented movable type.
You mean bellows? Invented independently by every civilization that discovered metallurgy.
Err, no. [wikipedia.org]. The closest you could get would be the early use of firearms against the Byzantines, but the people involved were not African.
Post-colonial South Africa doesn't count either, as it's culturally mostly European.
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]