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| Dawn Shaughnessy - source llnl.gov |
"The periodic table is chemistry's holy text."
I love that quote, the first line in an article from gizmodo.
The periodic table - I guess the discovery of the periodic law and subsequent creation of the periodic table - is the absolute ne plus ultra (yeah, I have a big lexicon, deal with it) of chemistry discoveries. That pattern - repeating properties of the elements when lined up by atomic number - has made the world, the elements that make up our everything utterly understandable and systematic rather than a random series of unconnected substances as they seemed to be before Mendeleev came along.
But Mendeleev's periodic table only included somewhere around 63 elements (his first had 63, his last versions had more than that).
Until William Ramsay came along and added the noble gasses, discovering four elements.
And Albert Ghiorso came along and - with the other scientists like Glenn Seaborg in his various labs - added in a dozen man-made elements.
The newest additions to the periodic table aren't necessarily the work of solo chemists toiling away in laboratories. They're the work of collaborative efforts between scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (near San Francisco, CA), the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (in Dubna, Russia), and a few other specialized sites around the world.
One of the lead scientists, Dawn Shaughnessy, is the subject of the gizmodo article linked above (and here again). She and her team have been instrumental in discovering six elements, the last four of which only received names just three years ago. Plus her team donated a $5000 grant to Livermore High School's science department, which is pretty cool.
Oh, if you wanted to know how new elements are created, check out this video...
...or this one about the search for elements 119 and 120...
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