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Article: Table for two.(Physical/Chemistry)
- Article from:
- Science World
- Article date:
- April 26, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Scholastic, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Chemistry class just got more complex. Thanks to U.S. and Russian scientists, the periodic table has two more squares.
The periodic table is a systematic list of Earth's elements--substances made of just one atom. "In chemistry, you can't get any simpler than an element," says Ken Moody, a nuclear chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Moody helped make two new elements, for now called ununtrium and ununpentium.
The new elements are superheavy (elements with an atomic number greater than 112) and don't occur naturally. To create them, scientists slammed atoms of calcium and americium together at about 32,000 kilometers ...