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Article: Back on the Table? Element 118 is served up again.
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- October 21, 2006
- Author:
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New research suggests that the periodic table may once again reach 118. A team of nuclear chemists from the United States and Russia has announced the brief appearance of the unnamed element, the heaviest to date.
A report of element 118 had made a splash before. In 1999, a group at Lawrence Berkeley (Calif.) National Laboratory claimed that it had created the element by bombarding lead with krypton ions (SN: 6/12/99, p. 372). But the researchers retracted the finding 2 years later (SN: 8/4/01, p. 68), after other labs couldn't reproduce the results.
The new work synthesized element 118 from different materials--an isotope of californium and calcium ...