Recently, four super heavy chemical elements have been discovered by scientists from Russia, Japan and America. These four elements have been verified and have now been added to the periodic table. If you've had one since you were in fourth grade, you may want to buy a new table this year.
The last time new elements were added was back in 2011 when elements 114 & 116 were included to the table.
Elements 115, 117 and 118 have been discovered by a Russian-American team of scientists from the California based Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Credit for Element 113 has been given to the Japanese team from Riken Institute.
Kosuke Morita and his Riken team are now planning to go beyond element 119.
Nobel Laureate, Ryoji Noyori expressed his excitement:
To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal.
The numbered synthetic elements have no official names yet and will be named by the credited teams that discovered them. On a side note, Element 113 is the first element to be named in Asia. How will these elements be named? Usually they are named after a place or a name of the scientist so it really depends on those who discovered them.
For the meantime, temporary names have been issued for these newly discovered elements. The following are ununtrium, with the symbol Uut for element 113, ununpentium with the symbol Uup for element 115, ununseptium with the symbol Uus for element 117 and ununoctium with the symbol Uuo for element 118.
The four latest addition have recently been verified on December 30 last year by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. This is the global organization and the leading world authority on chemical nomenclature, terminology, standardized methods for measurement, atomic weights and other critically evaluated data.
The four new elements added to the periodic table have completed the seventh row. Science books are now automaticlaly out-dated when this happened.
