News Brief: Setting a New Table
By Jocelyn Duffy
It looks like it's time to get a new periodic table of the elements. The Joint Working Party for the Discovery of New Elements, chaired by Carnegie Mellon Chemistry Professor Paul Karol, confirmed the discovery of two new elements in a paper published online in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry.
The elements, numbers 114 and 116, are the first to be added since Copernicium joined the chart in 2009. The new elements will be called ununquadium and ununhexium, Latin derivations of their atomic numbers, until the founding research team from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California assigns their official names.
A member of the Mellon College of Science faculty since 1969, Karol has chaired the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry/International Union of Pure and Applied Physics' Joint Working Party for the Discovery of New Elements since its inception in 1999. The group evaluates the evidence behind claims of elemental discovery and makes the ultimate decision on whether or not an element can enter the periodic chart. In the last 12 years, the group has conferred elemental status to three other elements: Darmstadtium, Roentgenium and Copernicium.
Pictured above is Paul Karol.