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Dec 3, 2011

If You Don’t Like the Names of These New Elements, Now’s the Time to Complain

Flerovium and livermorium have a nice ring, yeah? Chemistry's governing body thinks so and wants to name two new elements with them. If you disagree, you've only got five months to come up with something better.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, a union of chemists that maintains the periodic table and vets potential new additions to it, has proposed naming recently-discovered elements 114 and 116 flerovium and livermorium, respectively. Now, the names undergo a five month comment period wherein any member of the public can suggest alternatives—that includes you.

These super-heavy elements are so large and so unstable that they can only be manufactured in labs and rapidly degrade into other elements. Both were actually discovered a decade ago but their existence has been undergoing independent verification since then. They were created by a collaboration of researchers from Lawrence Livermore Labs and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.

Livermorium is named after the Livermore lab where it was created while flerovium bears the name of Georgi N. Flerov, the founder of the Dubna lab. If the names pass muster by next May, flerovium and livermorium will join three other recently-named elements—darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn)—at the bottom of the elemental table.
 
 

11 comments:

Tetsero said...

I love that they are finally naming these Uu[x]/Uh[x] elements. Though if I had something to complain about--it would be that Tungsten is W or that Potassium is K. Probably also that Sodium is Na (which stands for Natrium).

R said...

Interesting post.

Anonymous said...

Nice post.

Janie Junebug said...

Didn't care for the names at first glance but when you explained them, they made sense. So I say, Go right ahead, Chemists.

Love,
Lola

Outcast said...

This is great in my opinion. It's definitely interesting for sure! Excellent post!

Adam said...

They sound terrible

Heaven. said...

Meh.

annoymouse said...

replying to tetsero's comment, potassium is K because in latin, potassium is kalium and most other languages follow the latin version. not so sure abt tungsten tho

Unknown said...

Nice names, lol

Very Terrible said...

Livermorium sounds like a pill you'd have to take after years of excessive drinking.

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