Earlier in the year, there were a great deal of new elements discovered by a team of Russian physicists and American chemists. Of those elements, 113, 115, 117, and 118 are still needing names; elements 114 and 116 are going to be called Flerovium and Livermorium, according to the teams that discovered them. It’s up to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, or IUPAC, to approve of said names.
The new elements have names that honor the history of the two teams that worked on discovering them, Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Livermorium is obviously named for Lawrence Livermore and Livermore National Laboratory; Flerovium is named for Georgiy Flerov, the founder of Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, where the reactions were synthesized.
“Proposing these names for the elements honors not only the individual contributions of scientists from these laboratories to the fields of nuclear science, heavy element research, and super-heavy element research, but also the phenomenal cooperation and collaboration that has occurred between scientists at these two locations,” said Bill Goldstein, associate director of the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate at Livermore.
So what would you name the new elements? Read the full story here
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