Far out!
And cosmic baby!!!
Two fat atoms get the nod
If you’re the kind of person to lay out more than US$8,000 on a periodic table coffee table, The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has bad news for you: it’s obsolete. That’s because after deliberations lasting more than a decade, and a review process begun in 2008, the Joint Working Party on the …
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 00:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yeah well ...
I've invented Maggioreium by bombarding my skeleton's Calcium atoms with protactinium nuclei whilst standing in a zinc bucket filled with pigshit.
It has a half-life of 10−43 seconds and decays into one Carbon atom and four Hydrogen atoms. Through the power of 'make-believe'™.
Honestly -- sober up. These are not real elements you're talking about. Its the stuff of unicorns and bread-and-butterflies.
Scientific reportage has become a joke. The modern trend for dismantling 'standards' is outrageous. Neither wonder people have no interest in (what passes for) science today.
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 08:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Just....wow
I'm sitting here seriously trying to decipher through the medium of text alone if you are serious, or the sarcasm intended to carry with this post got lost in the sea of mark-up and cascading stylesheets that is the internet.
I'd love to know how you come to the conclusion that these "are not real elements" despite the fact they have been created, observed and interacted with in a repeatable way.
Contrast this with the following statement: "Scientific reportage has become a joke". I have news - the "reportage" of anything is a joke, what with reportage being a made up word - the stuff of unicorns if you will. By the way, as a side note, both "bread" and "butterflies" exist, at least one certainly exists at home in my fridge and the other existed up until it's arse went through its head as it impacted my windscreen on my way to work this morning.
If this is a joke, then I accept I'm wrong, but seriously, you really are a special kind of moron.
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 08:47 GMT MD Rackham
Hostility towards what one doesn't understand...
...doesn't make it go away.
And what's with the "dismantling standards" comment? You think the Periodic Table just sprang into being as a complete "standard"? It took over a hundred years of research to come up with the table and to understand the interrelationships between the elements recorded in it.
These researchers are just continuing in the footsteps of many others, and being damn careful about making sure that what they are doing is accurate and reproducible. You know, doing science.
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 08:47 GMT Trygve Henriksen
Why not?
Why shouldn't these elements be counted?
Because they have half-lives of seconds or less?
If so, what do you consider a minimum half-life?
Because they can't be found in nature?
There's no reason to believe that these didn't exist, briefly, just after the Big Bang.
There may still be places in the universe that are energic enough that they can be created 'naturally'.
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 09:01 GMT Geoff Campbell
Err, actually....
There is every reason to believe that these didn't exist after the big bang, as pretty much the only substance to come out of the initial cooling phase was hydrogen, followed by a brief period when a few light elements up to berylium were created. All other elements got created much later in stars as a result of fusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis#Heavy_elements
GJC
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 10:04 GMT Nigel 11
Supernovae
Maybe not in the big bang.
Almost certainly created in supernova explosions (which is where all the elements on Earth heavier than Iron were created, by bashing lighter nuclei together. (That's much the same way as scientists have created these short-lived superheavy nuclei, but on a much bigger scale ;-)
Any dividing line between an element and some more transient entity has to be completely arbitrary. One can separate stable nuclei from unstable ones, but that would exclude the fairly common naturally-occuring elements Uranium, Thorium and (maybe) Bismuth as well as their shorter-lived decay products. (Bismuth is a "maybe" challenging even that division. Theory suggests it's unstable with a VERY long half-life around 2*10^19 years, but the decay hasn't been observed because it's so rare).
-
-
-
-
-
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 08:38 GMT Zog The Undeniable
Unobtainium
It's about time we recognised unobtainium, the element which makes certain consumer products unaccountably expensive. For instance, Apple products use a thin vapour-deposited coating of unobtainium on their outer casing, which is why they cost three times more than anything else on the market of equivalent specification. It's also speculated that Leica uses unobtanium in its range of cameras and lenses.
-
-
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 08:48 GMT BristolBachelor
Un-unium?
I think that my shower curtain already has these called ununium and suchlike (but sadly no unobtainium which was always required in my last company).
Even people who haven't seen Penny step out from behind it in the Bing Bang Theory think it's cool. (Does that mean I have sad friends?)
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 10:44 GMT Charles 9
Unofficial names.
The "Unun" names you describe are tentative names given to stuff like element 113 when a submission is given. It's the scientific circle's way of saying, "It might exist, but give us time to verify it." Once it's officially recognized, then it gets a more common name, usually based on the circumstances of its discovery (Many of the heaviest elements have this basis for their names).
-
-
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 09:21 GMT Falanx
It's a lot nicer than some coffee tables I've seen...
Actually, that periodic coffee table has spaces reserved all the way up to element 118. So there. Theodore Grey's momma didn't raise no fools.
Second, Oakleys would almost certainly have a quiet word about trying to name anything after it's ear-sock and nose-piece wondermaterial.
-
Tuesday 7th June 2011 12:22 GMT Marvin the Martian
Nice table, but why the label?!
What's the bleeding point of a table saying "coffee table"? And if you're too dense to know it's the periodic table then this is not the product for you [I have this lead coffee table for you then]. Without text/title it would look better (and the market would be bigger!).
You'd think a bit of style would go with that kind of money, but no.
All in all a poor execution of a simple idea (we've all seen similar tables, e.g. for a wedding present make a table with similar little boxes, and let all friends & families drop in mementos; or fill them with beach sand from every holiday you've taken).
-
-
-
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
