• Question: Are we any closer to finding any new periodic table elements?

    Asked by alicewesley to Anna, George, Jodi, Rob, Stefan on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Rob Appleyard

      Rob Appleyard answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      We discover new, very heavy, elements quite regularly. The problem is that they are often very unstable and tend to decay very quickly into other elements and so it’s very hard to get any large amount of them.

    • Photo: Stefan Lines

      Stefan Lines answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      As Rob says, we are discovering new elements on a regular basis – but they are very unstable. It’s difficult to experiment and observe something that rapidly turns into something else. So, these elements aren’t particularly useful.

    • Photo: Anna Scaife

      Anna Scaife answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      I really like this website:

      http://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/history

      You can type in a year and it tells you how many elements we had found at that point. There are four elements in the table for this year that still have question marks over them because people keep claiming to have found them but not providing enough proof 🙂

Comments