Nuclear chemistry really isn’t my specialty, but how can I not be iinterested in the news that scientists have produced a new element? It’s element 118.
Scientists said they smashed together calcium with the manmade element californium to make an atom with 118 protons in its nucleus.
The new element would be one of the noble (inert) gases – so it wouldn’t be all that interesting to play with in our introductory chemistry laboratories.
![[Element 118]](http://whenchemistsattack.com/blogfiles/element118.png)
You wouldn’t want to play with element 118, anyway. Like most of the heavier elements, element 118 is extremely unstable.
The new element lasted for just one millisecond, […]
… so don’t go looking for it at your local chemical supplier anytime soon!
But wait a second … doesn’t the story of the discovery of element 118 sound just a bit familiar? Sure does!
At a meeting of LBNL employees in June of this year, director Charles Shank announced that the laboratory had recently disciplined one of the members of the team for “scientific misconduct.” A yearlong internal investigation had convinced the laboratory’s directorate that the evidence for the creation of element 118 and its decay sequence through element 116 in the 1999 experiment had, in fact, been surreptitiously fabricated by one of the experimenters.
(emphasis mine)
I can only hope that – this time – someone has very carefully checked over the data. Otherwise, we will have to name this as-yet-unnamed new element “unobtainium”.
On the positive side, the scandal over the original “discovery” of element 118 does illustrate, yet again, the self-correcting nature of science. A reseracher was able to fool people with suspect data for a time, but it was only a short time.
Californium is still my least favorite name for an element. It’s unfair that all them sciency types haven’t named one Southkakalakium.