The periodic table just got some new members, as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has officially accepted new names for four elements. Element numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 will no longer be known by their placeholder names, and instead have all-new monikers decided upon by their discoverers.

The discoveries were first recognized about a year ago, and the proposed names for them were decided upon this past June. Now, chemistry’s highest group has decided they are valid and will move forward with the all-new labels.

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Nihonium (Nh), is element 113, and is named for the Japanese word for Japan, which is Nihon.

Moscovium (Mc), element 115, is named for Moscow.

Tennessine (Tn), element 117, is named for Tennessee.

Oganesson (Og), element 118, is named after Yuri Oganessian, honoring the 83-year-old physicist whose team is credited with being the top element hunters in the field.

The official names will take the spot of placeholder titles that were given to the elemental numbers prior to their formal discovery. Those names — ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium — occupied the seventh row of the periodic table, and will now be discarded.

“The names of the new elements reflect the realities of our present time,” IUPAC President Prof Natalia Tarasova says via press release. “Universality of science, honoring places from three continents, where the elements have been discovered — Japan, Russia, the United States — and the pivotal role of human capital in the development of science, honoring an outstanding scientist — Professor Yuri Oganessian”.

With row seven now completed, chemists look to the road ahead, and hope to discover entirely new elements, keeping science on its toes and periodic table poster printers in business. </s> The scientists who discovered the four new elements added to the periodic table also proposed their names, which on Wednesday were approved and officially entered on the list.

Chemistry’s highest gatekeepers have accepted the newly proposed names for elements 113, 115, 117 and 118.

Please welcome to the periodic table: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson.

Scientists first synthesized the new elements between 2002 and 2010, but it wasn’t until last December that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially recognized the discoveries. In June, the scientists who discovered the superheavy, highly reactive elements sent IUPAC their suggested names.

After a five-month waiting period when members of the public could ask questions about the new elements, the four were approved Wednesday, formally filling their boxes in chemistry’s most fundamental table.

The four elements and where their names come from:
• Japanese researchers proposed nihonium, symbol Nh, for element 113, after the Japanese word Nihon, which means Japan.
• A team consisting of scientists from Russia and the United States named element 115, symbol Ms, after Moscow, and element 117, symbol Ts, after Tennessee.
• The Russian team that discovered it named element 118 oganesson, symbol Og, for Yuri Oganessian, a prolific element hunter. </s> The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), has officially approved the names of four new elements to be added to the periodic table. The new elements, Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson, are now officially part of the periodic table, in spots 113, 115, 117, and 118, respectively.

Back in January the IUPAC, which handles the naming of new elements, officially confirmed that the four new elements had been found. In June, the organization put these four names to a vote. Now those names have been accepted and are going on the periodic table.

Three of the elements, Nihonium, Moscovium, and Tennessine, were named after the places the were discovered, namely Japan (Nihon), Moscow, and Tennessee. The fourth, Oganesson, was named after Russian nuclear scientist Yuri Oganessian.

With the addition of these four elements, the seventh row of the periodic table has finally been completed. Any new elements discovered in the future will require an additional row.

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• 5 of the Oddest Ways to Start a Fire </s> Four new chemical elements now have official names and symbols, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) announced this week.

After a five-month review, IUPAC chemists have approved the four names for superheavy elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 proposed by the elements' discoverers. Such superheavy elements, whose atomic numbers indicate how many protons reside in each nucleus, don't occur naturally in nature, so they must be created in labs.

Following tradition, the names needed to honor a place, geographic region or scientist, with the name endings following specific protocols related to each element's placement on the periodic table of elements.

Here are the new names:

Element 113: nihonium (Nh)

Element 115: moscovium (Mc)

Element 117: tennessine (Ts)

Element 118: oganesson (Og)

The IUPAC announced in January that the four elements would land on the periodic table, though the elements remained nameless. Then, in June, the IUPAC announced the new names, which had yet to be finalized. [Elementary, My Dear: 8 Elements You've Never Heard Of]

The five-month window was meant to give the public a chance to make suggestions or raise concerns about the element names, considering these names will be used around the world, in many languages, Cleveland Evans, a professor of psychology who studies names and naming at Bellevue University in Nebraska and chairs the Name of the Year committee for the American Name Society, told Live Science in June.

The proposed names seem to have sailed through unscathed, though that doesn't mean interest was lacking.

"Overall, it was a real pleasure to realize that so many people are interested in the naming of the new elements, including high-school students, making essays about possible names and telling how proud they were to have been able to participate in the discussions," Jan Reedijk, president of the IUPAC's Inorganic Chemistry Division, said in a statement. "It is a long process from initial discovery to the final naming, and IUPAC is thankful for the cooperation of everyone involved. For now, we can all cherish our periodic table completed down to the seventh row."

Scientists with Japan's RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science proposed the element name nihonium, which is one way to say "Japan" in Japanese and means "the land of the rising sun," according to the IUPAC. Kosuke Morita and his colleagues created the elusive element on Aug. 12, 2012, after colliding zinc nuclei together in a thin layer of bismuth.

Like other superheavy elements, after 113 was created, it quickly decayed, ultimately turning element 113 into 111, and then 109, 107, 105, 103 and finally into element 101, according to Morita.

Names for elements 115 and 117 were proposed by their discoverers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; Vanderbilt University in Tennessee; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Both element names, moscovium and tennessine, honor regions where experiments linked to creating the elements took place.

The name oganesson, for element 118, honors Yuri Oganessian "for his pioneering contributions to transactinide elements research," IUPAC officials said, referring to elements with atomic numbers 104 through 120. "His many achievements include the discovery of super-heavy elements and significant advances in the nuclear physics of super-heavy nuclei, including experimental evidence for the 'island of stability,'" an idea suggesting that super-heavy elements can become stable at some point in their existence.

Though there is no certain limit for the number of protons that can be stuffed into an atomic nucleus, the higher the number, the more unstable the element, chemists say. Now that the seventh row (called a period) of the periodic table has been completed with element 118, according to the IUPAC, chemists will continue to search for heavier elements beyond that.

Original article on Live Science. </s> Luckily, that principle doesn't apply to elements of the periodic table.

'Nihonium (Nh),' Moscovium (Mc), Oganesson (Og) and Tennessine (Ts) are four elements that were officially name-approved and joined 118 other elements on the periodic table Wednesday. With the latest additions, the periodic table is now complete down to the seventh row.

What makes Nihonium (Nh) -- named after the country Japan (nihon) -- stand out is, maybe not it's super-creative name, but rather the fact that it's the first element to be discovered by a researcher from Asia.

Kosuke Morita, the father of 'nihonium' and a physics professor at Kyushu University said his team's addition to the periodic table was exciting and symbolic.

"All the elements before were discovered in the West, and it is wonderful that we now have an element discovered in Asia," said Morita in a statement. Nihonium is an extremely radioactive, superheavy, synthetically-made element that Morita's research group has been working on since 2003. The group synthesized element 113 for the first time in July 2004, repeating the feat in April 2005 and August 2012. They used RIKEN University's heavy ion linear accelerator -- a particle accelerator that increases the kinetic energy of charged ions to produce reactions. In December 2015, Kosuke Morita submitted his team's proposed name for element 113 to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. It was officially approved after undergoing a public review between June to November 2016. Next up, Morita wants to focus on discovering even heavier elements that might make it onto the periodic table. </s> Four new elements have been added to the periodic table, finally completing the table’s seventh row and rendering science textbooks around the world instantly out of date.

The elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.

The four were verified on 30 December by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the global organisation that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement.

IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118.

The body awarded credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the Riken institute in Japan.

Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at Riken, said his team now planned to “look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond.”

Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry said: “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal”.

The elements, which currently bear placeholder names, will be officially named by the teams that discovered them in the coming months. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.

“The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row,” said Professor Jan Reedijk, president of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC.

“IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalising names and symbols for these elements temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).”

New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.

The four new elements, all of which are synthetic, were discovered by slamming lighter ­nuclei into each other and tracking the following decay of the radioactive superheavy elements.



Like other superheavy elements that populate the end of the periodic table, they only exist for fractions of a second before decaying into other elements.
• This article was amended on 4 January 2016. The reference to the new elements being “manmade” was changed to “synthetic” to follow Guardian style guidance on the use of gender-neutral terms. </s> STOCKHOLM: The Nobel Chemistry Prize is to be announced on Wednesday, with observers suggesting it could go to gene-editing, the invention of the rechargeable battery or the discovery of new periodic elements.

Sweden’s biggest daily Dagens Nyheter tipped scientists at Russian, Japanese and US institutes that added four new elements to the periodic table: nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts) and oganesson (Og).

John Goodenough—a 94-year-old US scientist who invented the rechargeable lithium ion battery that is present in cell phones, computers and electric cars—was another of the favorites for the honor, mentioned by Dagens Nyheter and Swedish radio SR.

Also seen as Nobel-worthy was a technique known as CRISPR that can edit parts of the genome of still-developing embryos by cutting out, replacing or adding parts to the DNA sequence.

It was named by influential US journal Science as 2015’s breakthrough of the year due to its potential to revolutionize health and medicine.

But it could be too early for the jury to award it a Nobel this year, Dagens Nyheter noted, as a bitter patent dispute is currently being waged over who discovered it first.

Sweden’s other main daily Svenska Dagbladet nonetheless also mentioned CRISPR as a possible winner.

It also pointed to Hong Kong doctor Yuk-Ming Dennis Lo, the director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences.

Lo discovered a technique to detect chromosome abnormalities in unborn foetuses, such as Down’s Syndrome, where previous methods could cause a miscarriage.

The speculation will come to an end on Wednesday when the winner or winners are announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT).

The chemistry prize is the third Nobel to be announced this week.

On Tuesday, the physics prize went to British scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz for their work in on “topology”, a highly specialized mathematics field studying unusual phases or states of matter which may one day yield superfast and small computers.

On Monday, the medicine prize went to Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his pioneering work on autophagy—a process whereby cells “eat themselves”, which can result in Parkinson’s and diabetes when disrupted.

On Friday, all eyes will turn to Oslo where perhaps the most prestigious of the prizes, that for peace, will be announced.

The Norwegian jury has sifted through an avalanche of nominations this year—a record 376, almost a hundred more than the previous record from 2014.

Among those tipped are the orchestrators of two historic accords: the recent peace deal in Colombia between the government and the leftist FARC rebels, and the Iranian nuclear deal.

In a shock upset however, Colombians rejected the peace deal by a razor-thin majority in a referendum on Sunday, sending the former enemies’ chances of securing a Nobel up in smoke, according to experts.

Also mentioned are Russian activist Svetlana Gannushkina, who has championed the rights of migrants and refugees, Syria’s civil organization of emergency responders known as the White Helmets, and Greek islanders who have come to the aid of desperate migrants.

US fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, who revealed the extent of the NSA’s surveillance programs, has meanwhile been nominated for the third straight year.

The economics prize will be announced on Monday, October 10, and the literature prize wraps things up on October 13.

For that prize, the Swedish Academy could tap superstar novelists such as Philip Roth of the US or Haruki Murakami of Japan, or some lesser known writers such as Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse or Syrian poet Adonis. AFP </s> Image copyright Getty Images

Turkish police say they have seized 1.4kg (3lb) of radioactive material during an anti-smuggling operation in the capital, Ankara.

The material, which police said was the element Californium, was found when a car was searched in the Pursaklar suburb of the city, NTV news channel reported (in Turkish).

Four people in the car were detained.

Police said the suspects were part of a group that had planned to sell the material for more than $70m (£49m).

Pictures supplied by the authorities showed vials and a large packet containing a granular mixture laid out on a table.

It was not clear where the seized material had originated from. NTV said it had been taken to the Turkish Atomic Energy Authority (TAEK) for further examination.

Californium is believed to be produced only in the US and Russia. The isotope Californium-252 is used in nuclear reactors, in portable metal detectors and also in medicine to treat some forms of cancer. However, it is produced in very small quantities.

The element was first synthesized by a university laboratory in the US state of California in 1950. </s> Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016

4 October 2016

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 with one half to

David J. Thouless

University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

and the other half to

F. Duncan M. Haldane

Princeton University, NJ, USA

and

J. Michael Kosterlitz

Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

”for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”

They revealed the secrets of exotic matter

This year’s Laureates opened the door on an unknown world where matter can assume strange states. They have used advanced mathematical methods to study unusual phases, or states, of matter, such as superconductors, superfluids or thin magnetic films. Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter. Many people are hopeful of future applications in both materials science and electronics.

The three Laureates’ use of topological concepts in physics was decisive for their discoveries. Topology is a branch of mathematics that describes properties that only change step-wise. Using topology as a tool, they were able to astound the experts. In the early 1970s, Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless overturned the then current theory that superconductivity or suprafluidity could not occur in thin layers. They demonstrated that superconductivity could occur at low temperatures and also explained the mechanism, phase transition, that makes superconductivity disappear at higher temperatures.

In the 1980s, Thouless was able to explain a previous experiment with very thin electrically conducting layers in which conductance was precisely measured as integer steps. He showed that these integers were topological in their nature. At around the same time, Duncan Haldane discovered how topological concepts can be used to understand the properties of chains of small magnets found in some materials.

We now know of many topological phases, not only in thin layers and threads, but also in ordinary three-dimensional materials. Over the last decade, this area has boosted frontline research in condensed matter physics, not least because of the hope that topological materials could be used in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers. Current research is revealing the secrets of matter in the exotic worlds discovered by this year’s Nobel Laureates.

Read more about this year’s prize

Popular Science Background

Pdf 424 kB

Scientific Background

Pdf 800 kB

Image – Phases of matter (pdf 900 kB)

Image – Phase transition (pdf 622 kB)

Image – Topology (pdf 417 kB)

All illustrations: Copyright © Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

David J. Thouless, born 1934 in Bearsden, UK. Ph.D. 1958 from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.

https://sharepoint.washington.edu/phys/people/Pages/view-person.aspx?pid=85

F. Duncan M. Haldane, born 1951 in London, UK. Ph.D. 1978 from Cambridge University, UK. Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University, NJ, USA.

https://www.princeton.edu/physics/people/display_person.xml?netid=haldane&display=faculty

J. Michael Kosterlitz, born 1942 in Aberdeen, UK. Ph.D. 1969 from Oxford University, UK. Harrison E. Farnsworth Professor of Physics at Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/jkosterl

Prize amount: 8 million Swedish krona, with one half to David Thouless and the other half to be shared between Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz.

Further information: http://kva.se and http://nobelprize.org

Press contact: Jessica Balksjö Nannini, Press Officer, phone +46 8 673 95 44, +46 70 673 96 50, jessica.balksjo@kva.se

Experts: Thors Hans Hansson, phone +46 8 553 787 37, hansson@fysik.su.se, and David Haviland, haviland@kth.se, members of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, founded in 1739, is an independent organisation whose overall objective is to promote the sciences and strengthen their influence in society. The Academy takes special responsibility for the natural sciences and mathematics, but endeavours to promote the exchange of ideas between various disciplines.

Nobel Prize® is a registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation.

To cite this section

MLA style: Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Mon. 9 Sep 2019. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2016/press-release/>
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announces official names for recently-discovered superheavy elements Nihonium (113), Moscovium (115), Tennessine (117), and Oganesson (118).