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Received a cool postcard in the mail last month. It has three atomic elements in chart format across the top: #89, Actinium 227.0, #92 Uranium, 238.0, #88 Radium, 226.0. The abbreviations spell out AcURa. Below is a picture of a car with the caption: It's time for your Acura's periodic checkup. Regular maintenance is a key element of performance. Is that cool, or what??

Did you hear they just discovered element 118? How long can this go on, exactly? Can we trust any of these "discoveries"? I mean, something that exists for 1,000 th of a second? Is that even 'real'? It's like when I clean the guest bathroom and 1,000th of a second later Mr. Right walks in there to mess it up. Did it really count? Were my efforts cosmically recognized?

From the New York Times:

A team of Russian and American scientists said yesterday that it had created the heaviest element ever seen in a laboratory, a dab of matter that lasted for less than one-thousandth of a second but would add an entry at the farthest reaches of the periodic table and suggest that strange new elements may lie beyond.

Start writing that paper about elements in the seventh dimension now! By the time somebody disproves it, you'll be dead anyhow.

Hydrogen, the lightest element, has one proton in its nucleus, and uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element, has 92. Element 118 would fit comfortably just below radon in a column of the periodic table containing what are called noble gases for their inert chemical properties.

Are there negative elements? Ones lighter than hydrogen? The bullemics of the periodic table? They attract protons, but heave them up right away?

The results were met with praise but also caution from other scientists in the field, particularly given the fraught history of element 118. Another California lab, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, announced that it discovered the element in 1999 but retracted the claim two years later after an investigation found that one of its researchers, Dr. Victor Ninov, had fabricated data. Dr. Ninov was later fired.

Well I should hope so! Lying about seeing something for 1,000th of a second! Really now. I had no idea 'new elements' was such a competitive field. Getalifeium.

Dr. Gelbke said that there was one good reason that the Russian laboratory might be ahead of its competitors elsewhere in the world. Scientists at that lab, he said, are skilled in handling Californium, which is very radioactive and dangerous to the uninitiated.
“I wouldn’t want to do that myself,” Dr. Gelbke said, chucking. “It’s a fairly nasty substance for most people to handle.”

My guess is no one told the Russian scientists there might be any danger. Vomiting and glowing are common in the Chernobyl area. Nothing like a total lack of health and safety standards to abeit science.

The numbers 2, 8, 20, 28, 50 and 82 are magic for both protons and neutrons. The highest known magic number for neutrons alone is 126, meaning that common lead, with 82 protons and 126 neutrons, is the heaviest known “doubly magic,” or extremely stable, isotope in the periodic table.

Harry Potter and the Unknown Isotope