Unobtainium...
See title...
Periodic table enjoys elemental engorgement
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has announced it's satisfied that elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 really do exist and can take their places on the periodic table. Element 113 (going under the temporary name and symbol ununtrium, Uut) was discovered in 2012 by the Japanese research institute RIKEN …
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Monday 4th January 2016 15:58 GMT roytrubshaw
Re: Unobtainium...
<pedant>
No! I say and thrice more No!
This is the element that Dyson Spheres are probably built from (though not Ringworlds - I think that's "Scrith") and is probably what powers light-sabres, hyperdrives, makes micro-fusion possible and a host of other things that we should - in the Red Queen's words - believe in before breakfast.
And since all of these elements have pretty short half-lives there's no way any of them can actually be Unobtainium.
Anyway I'm off before the nice men and women in those bright, white lab...
</pedant>
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Tuesday 5th January 2016 12:45 GMT Peter2
Re: Unobtainium...
ElRegium?
Given that the Roman empire is long since dead, and Latin is a completely dead language that a mere handful of people can read, and fewer still could hold a conversation in it WHY do we persist on hanging Latin suffixes on words that maybe 0.01% of the worlds population understands?
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Tuesday 5th January 2016 18:56 GMT Kristian Walsh
Re: Unobtainium...
It's precisely because nobody speaks Latin that it's used so much for naming. The idea is to have a language that everyone can agree does not favour any one country.
Look at Switzerland: it has four spoken languages, each with its own vocal lobby: even deciding what to put on the postage stamps was a contentious question. The solution was to use Latin, as it belonged to no group at all. So, the stamps say "Helvetia", and the car-stickers read "CH" ("Confœderatio Helvetica" - "[the] Swiss Confederation"), as does the ISO Country code and thus Switzerland's top-level domain name.
Latin's other advantage is that because there are no native speakers to object, its pronunciation has, over the centuries, been knocked into a form that's simple enough that speakers of pretty much any other language can master it.
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Wednesday 6th January 2016 20:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Unobtainium...
"Latin's other advantage is that because there are no native speakers to object, its pronunciation has, over the centuries, been knocked into a form that's simple enough that speakers of pretty much any other language can master it."
Ah, but ancient documentaries of Rome clearly show Latin spoken with a British accent (occasionally American), not this silly southern Italian accent they're trying to get us to use...
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Monday 4th January 2016 16:55 GMT Dwarf
Re: Unobtainium...
Have an upvote.
That was EXACTLY on my mind when I hit the forum button and low,you had beaten me to it.
If you are adding that though, then the lower number to it must be the easier to generate "Rarataninum"
Ratchet and Clank - a great time waster. Perhaps I'll go and waste some more time on it ..
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Monday 4th January 2016 18:31 GMT Turtle
It is SO Obvious: Re: Unobtainium...
"Doubtless readers will suggest suitably inspiring titles for 113, 115, 117, and 118, before it's too late."
These elements should be named "onethirteenium, onefifteenium, oneseventeenium, and oneeighteenium" respectively.
Got any other problems do you need solved?
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Monday 4th January 2016 14:45 GMT Your alien overlord - fear me
The Japanese were the 2nd to find element 113 but they were the first to reproduce the making of it (3 times I think) so they get first dibs at naming it. The Russian/US teams found it first but couldn't make it again.
So, are we going to get a remake of The Fifth Element but with a 113 year old Bruce Willis?
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Monday 4th January 2016 14:47 GMT Dr. G. Freeman
113 will be something to do with RIKEN or Japan (Japonium, Rikenium)
115, was the Dubna lot, so Moscovium (we already have Dubnium)
117, Oak Ridge, so Weinburgium after it's first boss maybe ? Well, Weinburgine seeing as it's a halogen- oe either named after the lab (Oakine) or after the state (Tennessine, or Tennessium),
118, Dubna/ Lawerence Livermore team up - so that'll be something safe and non-political... but has to end in -on as its a Noble Gas. Higgson, maybe ?
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Monday 4th January 2016 14:59 GMT Guus Leeuw
What? New direction at The Reg?
Dear Sir,
"Doubtless readers will suggest ..." Why does the author think that his readers are doubtless? I, for one, doubt that the author actually means what he wrote.
So, El Reg, what about that stone editor, now that the site is going to undergo a dramatic change in direction?
Also, while you're at it: How about HTTPS?
Regards.
Guus
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Tuesday 5th January 2016 04:19 GMT Tim99
Re: I have a compromise deal for you Americans
Hi Steven,
I posted this in reply to a similar post a couple of years ago:-
Look, we're spelling sulphur sulfur now, the least you could do is reciprocate ;)
OK, what follows is nearly interesting. IUPAC (International Union of Pure And Applied Chemistry) decrees that the correct spellings are aluminium and sulfur. ...
Sulphur is sulfur as it comes from a Latin root rather than Greek, and early UK spellings used the "f". It was turned into the pseudo-posh "ph" later. There is a heated thread about it on The Royal Society of Chemistry website - Link: rsc.org
The definitive IUPAC periodic table is here: PDF file.
USAians are allowed ( but not encouraged by their education system) to use the correct aluminium.
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Monday 4th January 2016 17:03 GMT WraithCadmus
Re: If you played the original X-COM game
Sadly there's requirements, it can only be called after a person if they were a scientist and it seems poor Bob doesn't quite have the qualifications claimed. Mythological names are okay though, is the alien-mania of the 80s and 90s long enough ago to count?
New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.
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Tuesday 5th January 2016 17:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Asimovum?
Thatcher!!!!!! Never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever should any element be named after that community destroying, self serving, ice cream maker. Yes, she was notionally a chemist, but her only contribution to science was to find a method of adding air to ice cream so that you ended up paying out money of air rather than the ice cream you wanted. The then went on to take school milk away from us as children. One can only assume that there was some underlying desire to remove dairy goodness from the mouths of Britain's children. She probably wanted to reintroduce rickets to the working classes.
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Monday 4th January 2016 20:35 GMT Efros
Re: Hate to burst your bubble...
Aluminum is the more archaic form as it was set down by Davy before aluminium(1812), if we want to be really archaic Davy first called it alumium(1807). Besides IUPAC, the presiding body, decided in 1990 that aluminium was the standard international name for the element, it later recognized that aluminum was an acceptable variant. Pity they couldn't do the same for sulphur!
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Monday 4th January 2016 19:00 GMT Bob Dole (tm)
Extreme Marketing Opportunity
If I was CEO of a major multinational company I'd be doing everything I could to bid on naming one of these.
- Cokium
- Applonium
- ibmium
Just think about it: you could be the CEO that PERMANENTLY etches the name of your company into the fabric of the universe.
and, if I'm the head of IUPAC, then I'd be auctioning off those names starting at $1bn each.
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Tuesday 5th January 2016 12:59 GMT toughluck
Re: Extreme Marketing Opportunity
Elements are named so that they remain somewhat sane. Researchers are free to name the element they synthesized with the caveat that the name needs to reflect the origin of the element or honor an important physicist or chemist.
However, if IUPAC took this advice, they could subvert it. By all means, name your element Googlium or Iphonium. Aw, it looks like you're not the ones to have discovered it. Hmm, maybe if you invest money into your own research center, complete with researchers and equipment and synthesized your own new element?
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Monday 4th January 2016 20:47 GMT Alan Esworthy
yet more suggestions
113 (RIKEN/Japan): Nipium, Ninjium, Udonium, Tempurium, Unagium
115 (Dubna/Russia): Putinium if they know what's good for 'em
117 (Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA): Yallium, Jackdanielsium, Bluegrassium
118 (Dubna/Russia & L.Livermore/USA): All I have are shitty suggestions: Crapon, Poopon
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Monday 4th January 2016 22:53 GMT Timbo
how about these?
in view of some recent "heavy metal" rock icons departing this mortal coil, I propose:
Philtyium
Kilmisterium
Wurzelium
Lynottium (as it's 30 years to day that he died)
(for non-rock fans, these relate to 3 now deceased MotorHead band members: Phil "Philthy" Taylor, Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, Michael "Wurzel" Burston and the late lamented Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy).
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Tuesday 5th January 2016 06:02 GMT Public Citizen
Octorinium?
Element 118 should be named in honor of Sir Terry Pratchett the recently deceased British Author, humorist, and philosopher.
The number Eight has played a significant role in the shaping of the background of his best selling Discworld series.
His works in collaboration with science authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen [The bestselling Science of Discworld series] have brought some serious science lessons to a general public that would otherwise never crack a science book.
Having posted this before reading the earlier posted comments I hereby add an upvote to everyone who suggested this, plus the entirely appropriate reference to the British Phone System, which Sir Terry would find both relevant and humorous in a sufficiently obscure way.
GNU: Pratchett
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Thursday 7th January 2016 03:56 GMT Graeme Sutherland
Element 115
I'm really disappointed that Element 115 doesn't exhibit any of the characteristics that Bob Lazar claimed back in the 1980s. Chief of which was that it was used as a power source for flying saucers.
Had it done so, we could have called it Lazarium, Alium, or something similar. Ah, well.
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Wednesday 9th March 2016 07:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Element 115
Thats because people misunderstood, 115 was actually 115In.
Which does exist in very small amounts in nature but can be enriched and has some very strange ferromagnetic properties as well as a long (10^14 years) half life suggesting it could be meta-stable.
The latest twist is that some of the "floating saucer" pictures as well as the early 1940's German craft could have been a variant of what is now used in hoverboards.
In this case the rotating Cu plated Al field coils repelling a ground based magnetic rotor spinning in the opposite direction were only ever used for initial take-off and not for flight to add stability to the system in a similar way to the rotating blades on a helicopter.
If a simple B-2 can fly despite being totally unstable aerodynamically then it makes me wonder just how many UFO reports were actually some secret test or other.
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Saturday 9th January 2016 05:50 GMT Fluffy Cactus
Since you guys can't agree on anything, let me contribute
to the confusion with the following suggestions:
113: Fujiyamium, Tsunamium, Quakium, Origatonium, Sushium
115: Zarbombakaboom, Riotpussium, Putinium, Rasputinium
117: Rockridgium, Unnecessarium, Dollypartonium, Cubanrum
118: Barackiputinion, VladiObamion, Putinohillarion, Notonthephon
Biting the hand that feeds IT
