Periodic table gets four new elements

Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 to be named by scientists from Russia, U.S., Japan

Four new elements have been officially added to the periodic table, completing its seventh row.
Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 have been penciled in on the table for years, and laboratories in Russia, the United States and Japan have made multiple claims to discover them. But official recognition had to wait until the end of 2015, when a group of independent experts agreed that the evidence was valid. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, announced the group’s conclusions on December 30, 2015.

All of the elements were created in the lab, by smashing lighter atomic nuclei together. The unstable agglomerations of protons and neutrons lost mere fractions of a second before they fall apart into smaller, more stable fragments.

The teams that have been given credit for the discoveries can now put forward proposals for the elements’ names and two-letter symbols. Elements can be named after one of their chemical or physical properties, a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, or a scientist.
Priority for discovering element 113 went to researchers in Japan, who are particularly delighted because it will become the first artificial element to be named in East Asia. When the element was first sighted 12 years ago, ‘Japonium’ was suggested as a name.

The team at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science in Wako, near Tokyo, made its first claim to have spotted element 113 in 2004, and followed it up with a more convincing sighting in 2012. By then, it had created three atoms of the element. “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal,” said Ryoji Noyori, who received the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, at a press conference about the IUPAC decision. (Noyori was not a member of the Japanese team, but is a former president of RIKEN).

Russian and US researchers made a rival claim to have discovered 113, but were not given priority by the expert group, drawn from IUPAC and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).

However, Russia and the United States did get the credit and naming rights for the other new elements. Elements 115 and 117 were first created by collaboration between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the IUPAC/IUPAP committee said. Work from other teams, such as a Swedish group using a German accelerator, helped to confirm element 115’s existence.
The credit for discovering element 118 — the heaviest ever created — has been assigned to the Dubna and Lawrence Livermore teams. The element has a chequered history: a 1999 claim to have made it was retracted two years later amid accusations that data had been falsified.

Physicists will now try to create elements 119 and 120, a feat that should be possible with current technology, says Rolf-Dietmar Herzberg, a nuclear physicist at the University of Liverpool, UK. No one has yet claimed a sighting, however: researchers at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, tried for five months in 2012 without success. Beyond element 120, researchers agree, the chances of getting two nuclei to fuse are vanishingly small.

*Culled from Nature

5 Proofs that he was a regular hommie - Albert Einstein

Life isn’t always easy, even when you’re a genius. But
what else do you have in common with Albert Einstein?

A free archive of the famed physicist’s writings released
on Friday might help you find out. Transcribed,
translated, and annotated with historical insight, the
“Digital Einstein” project at the Princeton University
Press dives deep into Einstein’s early years.
“This is Einstein before he was famous,” says California
Institute of Technology historian Diana Kormos-Buchwald ,
director of the Einstein Papers Project that created the
new archive, a collaboration of Princeton, Caltech, and
Hebrew University. “This material has been carefully
selected and annotated over the last 25 years.”
The archived letters, lectures, and other papers take
readers from Einstein’s 1879 birth certificate to letters
he wrote on his 44th birthday in 1923, fresh off the
triumph of the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics . Perusing the
documents reveals that the 20th century’s greatest
genius was, at least in some ways, a lot like the rest of
us:

1. He was passed over for his dream job..
In 1902, Einstein was appointed to the Swiss Patent Office
as an examiner with some help from a friend, after he was
disappointed in his hopes for a gig as a university
professor. “Largely that was his own fault-he wasn’t a
great student,” says historian Matt Stanley of New York
University. “He was disrespectful to his professors and
skipped classes because he knew he could pass anyway. So,
when he asked for recommendations, he didn’t get them.”
Sound familiar? Take heart from this: A backwater job
didn’t stop Einstein from pursuing his dreams. “Einstein’s
family was involved in electronics, and the patent office
was a world very familiar to him,” says Massachusetts
Institute of Technology historian David Kaiser, author of
How the Hippies Saved Physics. Tasked with determining
the soundness of principles behind new inventions, Einstein
played to his talents and translated those skills to the
scientific work that culminated in his 1905 “Miracle Year”
that led to his Nobel Prize, alongside papers on light’s
speed, atomic behavior and the famous E = mc² equation

2. He liked to kick back..
“Both of us, alas, dead drunk under the table,” Einstein
wrote, referring to himself and his wife Mileva Maric, in a
1915 postcard sent to his pal Conrad Habicht .
Habicht was a co-founder of the Olympia Academy in Bern,
Switzerland, a drinking club where friends debated
philosophy and science.
“The young Einstein was a Bohemian, not the sage we
think of now,” Stanley says. Much like a dorm-room bull
session, “that’s what young people did then; they hung
out in beer halls and argued about the nature of space and
time.”
Einstein later said the club had a great effect on his
career.

3. He had romantic troubles and a messy divorce..
Einstein married Maric, a fellow physicist, in 1903. She had
already borne him a daughter named Lieserl the year
before. Historians are unclear whether the couple gave up
the child for adoption or if she died in infancy.
The couple was estranged starting around 1912 and
divorced, finally, in 1919. As part of the divorce decree ,
which you can read in the archive, Einstein agreed that he
would give his ex-wife most of the proceeds from a still
un-awarded Nobel Prize, to care for the children and live
off the interest.
“In the letters we see the young Einstein was a lot like
the later one, uninterested in convention and set on
having his own way, a bit of a rebel, irresistible to
women,” Stanley says. “He dove into a few relationships
that turned sour, although I think he learned some lessons
later in life.”
Don’t we all.
Einstein married his cousin, Elsa, in 1919, the same year
as his divorce

4. His kids were rascals.
That’s what he calls them in a 1922 letter to his two sons,
Hans Albert and Eduard, asking them to write him in Spain
when he was on the way back from a trip to Japan.
Einstein was obviously fond of his sons, writing to them
from his travels and throughout their lives, inquiring
about their schoolwork. Eduard’s life famously took a
tragic turn when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at
age 20.
The scientist also enlisted his older son, Hans Albert, in
looking after his finances, asking him in 1922 to inquire at
a Zurich bank about an unexpected sum of money in his
account there.
Kids and money-some problems never change.
Einstein wrote in German his entire life, as seen in this
letter to his son, Hans Albert Einstein. Photograph by
Profiles in History, Corbis

5. Road trip!...
Einstein skipped the Nobel Prize ceremonies to take a trip
to the Far East.
“I have decided definitely not to ride around the world so
much anymore; but am I going to be able to pull that off,
too?” he wrote his sons after his 1922 trip to Japan.
Unlike most of us, for Einstein travel was more than an
escape from the mundane: In other notes in the archive,
the physicist acknowledges that the assassination that
year of Germany’s foreign minister Walther Rathenau by
right-wing extremists helped persuade him to leave
Germany for a while.
Those same dark forces led to his eventual emigration to
the United States from Europe, to escape Hitler’s
spreading destruction of Germany’s Jews.
Those adventures are covered in more volumes of archives
that Kormos-Buchwald and her colleagues hope to release
next year, ones which will mark the centennial of
Einstein’s seminal 1915 theory of gravity.
So just as for you, there are more adventures ahead for
Einstein, ones waiting to be revealed. Even six decades
after his death, more discoveries await for historians
tracing the marks he left on our times.
“You might think scholars have already picked over all
these volumes, but there is so much more,” says Kormos-
Buchwald.
The Digital Einstein team hopes to see more historians
explore Einstein’s world as the archives roll out, and for
more everyday folks to see the human side of a man who
forever wrestled with his world, despite genius, fortune,
and fame

This article first appeared on
National Geographic ©2014

The man who Motivated and inspired Charles Darwin

Most people have never heard of Charles Waterton, but
the conservation pioneer is credited with both inspiring
Charles Darwin to travel to South America (where the
famous naturalist would later develop his theory of
evolution) and constructing the world's first nature
preserve – a move that radically shifted 19th Century
attitudes when animals were more often feared and
exploited.
In light of recent debates between conservationists,
hunters and the general public on how to best preserve
and protect dwindling animal populations, I stopped by
Waterton Lakes National Park (WLNP) in Alberta, Canada,
where the conservationist’s namesake park is battling
with a bear population that’s encroaching upon nearby
towns, farms and ranches. Nearly 150 years after his
death – and 10 years after grizzly bear hunts were
suspended in WLNP – I wanted to see if Waterton's
philosophies of protecting all animals – even those that
are feared or seen as less useful – still worked in a place
where the wildlife has gotten too populous for the
protected area.
The largest of the three Waterton Lakes straddles the
Canada-US border, meaning you can wake up in Alberta,
hike into Montana and be back in Canada for supper. WLNP
isn't as famous or often visited as Banff , Canada's oldest
national park just 380km to the south, but those who
know it love it with an affection usually reserved for
hometown sport teams. Its two biggest draws are
wildflowers – more than 1,000 vascular plant species
grow here – and the bears.
At just 505sqkm, WLNP is the smallest of Canada's Rocky
Mountain parks. Yet it’s home to between 40 and 80 black
bears – far more than the park's ecosystem can support.
Canadian researcher Andrea Morehouse also found hair
samples from 177 individual grizzlies (a North American
subspecies of the brown bear) in the park and its
surrounding areas. As a result, the animals have been
seen venturing onto the plains where food is more
abundant. In 2014, the Fish and Wildlife Enforcement
Branch for Pincher Creek District – the area bordering the
north end of WLNP – recorded 52 incidents with grizzly
bears, including 17 proven livestock kills, two animals
injured and 21 instances of human conflict.
Visitors to the park are advised to carry with them a
canister of bear spray – pressurised pepper spray that
can convince even the most stubborn of bears to leave you
alone. But some children living near the national park
even carry bear spray to school, because walking from
their front door to the school bus stop might mean
negotiating a grizzly.
"Places I would have gone bareback riding as a kid, I
wouldn't send my kids there because there are bears,"
explained Jeff Bectell, a fourth-generation rancher and
president of the Waterton Biosphere Reserve Association,
an organisation that has developed a Carnivores and
Communities programme to tackle conflicts in
southwestern Alberta.
Parks Canada human wildlife contact specialist Jon
Stuart-Smith has seen a shift towards tolerance of
predators. “Even up to the 1940s, park employees were
encouraged to destroy predators to keep ‘good’ wildlife.
Now people come to the park to see predators,” he said.
To get a sense of how WLNP’s current strategies are
working, I met up with local rancher and bear expert,
Charlie Russell, who explained that bears are not
naturally violent towards people and that it’s possible to
live near these predators without fear. “A bear that likes
you won't hurt you, and I've tested that," he said.
I spotted my first bruin, a cinnamon-coloured black bear,
rummaging in long grass near the 14km Red Rock Parkway
that cuts through the park. Similar in colour to a grizzly,
it lacked the distinctive shoulder hump and dish-shaped
face of the bigger bears but seemed equally fond of the
protein-rich roots of yellow hedysarum and other
grassland plants. Later that evening I saw a darker-
coloured grizzly, lanky and slim like a teenager, slipping
down the boulders of a narrow riverbank and crossing
from one meadow to another.
While the prairie landscape gave me an unobstructed view
of the bears, it also gives the animals a clear view of their
food – not all of it grass. "In 18 years ranching next to
Waterton Lakes National Park, I didn't lose one cow to
bears, but I saw them killing cows on my neighbour's
property," Russell said.
To help farmers living near WLNP absorb the cost of living
with apex predators, the Alberta government compensates
for livestock killed by bears, although some farmers
complain it is too little or too hard to get. Currently
compensation comes from funds collected for hunting and
fishing licenses, although some ranchers have suggested
all Alberta taxpayers should contribute to the cost since
many of the bears seen in the national park live part of
their lives on the farms and ranches nearby.
I pondered my willingness to pay as I strolled through
Waterton town – and I stopped, puzzled, when I passed a
golf cart occupied by two border collies wearing reflective
orange vests. They sat quietly near a sign reading “Help
Keep the Wild in Wildlife”. "[The dogs] chase deer out of
town before they give birth because mama deer are very
aggressive,” a woman explained. The deer also attract
cougars, so keeping them away prevents another human-
wildlife conflict.
It seemed 150 years after his death, Charles Waterton's
philosophy of protecting predators was still in vogue, even
though his practice of putting fences around wildlife no
longer worked. Instead I saw humans and wildlife learning
to co-exist, with deer-herding dogs and bear-savvy
school children. People were building on the concepts of
Charles Waterton, protecting creatures for their own
value, while modifying them for a different era. And the
proof it was working was being able to watch a bear going
about his business without fear – on my part or the
bear’s.