Kosuke Morita of Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science points out the new elements added to the periodic table of the elements during a press conference.
Memorising the periodic table just got even harder as four new
elements have just been included, completing its seventh row and
instantly rendering all science textbooks outdated.
The
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry have verified elements
113, 115, 117, and 118, which will soon get their new names.
Elements
can be named after a mythological concept, mineral, place, country,
property or a scientist. The last element to be named was Ununseptium in
2010.
The periodic table changes will require updates to all science textbooks.
The US-based union announced there is now enough evidence to give
the synthetic elements - discovered by Japanese, Russian and American
scientists - permanent places on the table.
"As the global organisation that provides objective scientific
expertise and develops the essential tools for the application and
communication of chemical knowledge for the benefit of humankind, the
[union] is pleased and honoured to make this announcement," president Dr
Mark Cesa said.
"We are excited about these new elements, and we thank the dedicated scientists who discovered them for their painstaking work."
The scientists will be invited to suggest permanent names and symbols before they are presented for public review.
The existence of the four elements had been difficult to confirm because they decay in a matter of seconds
They earlier had temporary names and positions on the table because scientists had struggled to create them more than once.
Element 113 was discovered by a team of Japanese scientists at the RIKEN institute.
Kosuke Morita, who led the research, said his team searched for more than seven years for data to identify the element.
"We
just never saw another event," he said. "I was not prepared to give up,
however, as I believed that one day, if we persevered, luck would fall
upon us again."
And so it did on August 12, 2012, when the group observed the crucial third event.
Mr Morita said his team now planned to "look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond".
Former Riken president and Nobel Laureate in chemistry Ryoji Noyori told the Guardian: "To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal".
A
Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear
Research in Dubna, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California
discovered elements 115, 117 and 118.
The last elements added were 114 and 116 in 2011.
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