Author: Nancy Shute / Source: Science News
On March 6, 1869, Dmitrii Mendeleev’s periodic table was unveiled, and we’ve launched a yearlong celebration of the 150th anniversary of his iconic work. In this issue, we’re looking ahead to imagine the periodic table of the future, as scientists strive to create bizarre new elements.
And we also set ourselves a science visualization challenge: charting the half-lives of all the unstable elements on a single page.In the 20th century, physicists realized that they could create new elements by bombarding or smashing together existing elements. So far, more than two dozen new elements have been created, with atomic numbers ranging up to 118.
Our resident physics Ph.D./journalist Emily Conover leads us on an armchair tour of laboratories in Russia, Japan and the United States, where scientists are testing the limits of…
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