Scientists have submitted their suggested names for the new Periodic Table elements, elements 114 and 116. If the names are accepted, element 114 will become Flerovium, named after Georgiy Flerov, and element 116 will become Livermorium, named after the laboratory in California where it was discovered. The tables governing body will officially endorse the two names in around five months from now, which would obviously give the names a pretty good shot a becoming official.
Elements 114 and 116 aren’t the only new elements awaiting names, though element 113, 115, and 118 are still under review, making them currently ineligible to be at the naming stage.
A team of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions discovered the elements in an interesting way — certainly not something we normal folk get to claim we do for our job. They smashed calcium ions into the element curium, which created element 116, which in turn, happens to quickly decay into element 114. The teams then discovered they were able to create element 114 without the help of 116’s decay by replacing curium with plutonium, then smashing said calcium ions into that.
The names seem all but officially accepted, as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry will accept the names after allowing the public to ruminate on the names.
(via BBC News)
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Published: Dec 2, 2011 10:30 am