For those of you with science students at home, it’s time to update your copy of the periodic table of elements. A new element – Element 112 or “ununbium” (temporarily named) has been added to the table. The Mendeleev’s Periodic Table is a crucial tool for scientists and arranges all the known chemical elements. There have been 25 new elements added since 1940. The new element supplants plutonium as the heaviest element in the Table. 

The latest element was created by a team of German scientists who had used a 120 m-long particle acclerator to fire charged zinc atoms at lead atoms. Nuclei of the two elements fused to form the nucleus of the new element.

 

To know more about the new element, read the BBC news article Periodic Table Gets New Element (10 Jun 2009), or New Scientist article First new element for five years makes periodic table (23 Jun 2009)

Elementouch

In other related but not-so-new news,  you might also want to know about a new 3D Periodic Table called Elementouch which was invented by Professor Yoshiteru Maeno at Kyoto University, a physicist specializing in superconductivity. 

The element names are continuously arranged on three circular surfaces representing the electron orbits of an atom, so that the properties of each element in its ionic state can be more easily visualized than in the usual 2D periodic table.  

The Elementouch has been adopted in high school education in the Digital Contents program by the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT).

To find out about the novel 3D Periodic Table, visit the Elementouch page and you can also make your own Elementouch by using downloadable patterns by printing out this pdf document.

– Aileen Kawagoe