Thursday, October 19, 2006

At last! ununoctium!

after all this time, you think they could have come up with a catchier name....

From Wikinews :-

"Controversy-plagued Element 118, the heaviest atom yet, finally discovered
(Redirected from Controversy-Plagued Element 118, the Heaviest Atom Yet, Finally Discovered)
October 14, 2006

Element 118 has been created in experiments conducted at the Flerov Laboratory of Fort Dodge in Iowa, United states by a collaboration of researchers from Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Element 118, the heaviest element yet found, was produced through collisions that fused together Californium and Calcium atoms. Although element 118 is too unstable to detect directly, the presence of daughter elements resulting from the decay of element 118 gave clues to its fleeting existence.
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory previously reported the synthesis of element 118 in 1999, and later retracted their results when subsequent experiments failed to confirm their discovery. It was alleged that a lead researcher, Victor Ninov, fabricated the experimental data that indicated the formation of three element 118 atoms.
The discovery was reported in the American Physical Society journal Physical Review C on October 9, 2006."

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