Just before the year 2015 ended, another achievement was reported in the Chemistry world. According to recent reports, there are four new elements discovered, thus making some periodic table of elements and textbooks obsolete.
Updates should be made for four elements with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118 were officially verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). And these said new elements are synthetic elements which were brought artificially through experiments. The guardian reported that these new additions in the periodic table of elements were discovered by scientists from the different parts of the globe, particularly by scientists in Japan, Russia and America. This event follows the recent discovery of elements 114 and 116 back in 2011.
What makes this discovery very exciting is the fact that it was the first time that Asian scientists were able to discover an element. According to reports this was not the first time that the team from Japan's Riken Institute were able to create the said element, for back in 2004 and 2012 they were able to create it 3 times.
And with such achievement, they will be able to name the element they have discovered, the element 113. In a statement via rappler, it was stated that, "IUPAC has announced that Morita's group will be given priority for the discovery of the new element, a privilege that includes the right to propose a name for it."
Indeed this is a time for celebration for the research team at Riken and all over the globe. "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, via theguardian. But still despite the said achievement of the Japanese researchers, Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at Riken, is still "look[ing] to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond."
