The march of science tends to make our high-school educations in various subjects woefully incomplete, which is a problem since most of us deploy that education in the noble pursuit of beating that one bar trivia team you’re sure is looking at their phones under the table every Thursday night. Meet the new elements that will fill out the seventh row of the periodic table, and help you in your quest for moral, if not actual, trivia superiority.
Well, meet them in abstract. Just like their buddies at the end of the seventh row (flerovium and livermorium), Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 are man-made elements that barely exist before decaying. In fact, 115 only stuck around for between 30 and 80 milliseconds when created by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We have no idea how to make these elements in large enough quantities to learn about their properties beyond the fact they disappear faster than the chips at a party.
That said, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry — the governing body that decides what goes on the periodic table — has decided these elements have been synthesized often enough that we can declare they exist, officially filling out the seventh row of the periodic table. The next step is going to be naming them, an honor given to the nuclear labs that found them. Japanese lab RIKEN uncovered 113, Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and America’s Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Lab found 115 and 118, and Russia’s Flerov Lab discovered 117; considering Livermore and Flerov both named elements after themselves, there’s probably going to be some discussion before they pick a name. And if you’re wondering, yes, scientists are already speculating on the nature of an eighth row in the periodic table, but it’ll be a while before you have to learn some new element names for bar trivia.
(Via ScienceAlert)