Meet the Newest Elements of the Periodic Table

"Hello, Helen Look broken bottle can not overflow Nile, So may all silly people suffer cholera aginst Potassium Calcium" - This was my own mnemonics for the first 20 elements of the periodic table in my early high school years.

Hello (Hydrogen) Helen (Helium) Look (Lithium) Broken (Beryllium) Bottle (Boron) Can (Carbon) Not (Nitrogen) Overflow (Oxygen, fluorine) Nile (Neon) So (Sodium) May (Magnesium) All (Aluminium)  Silly (Silicon) People (Phosphorus) Suffer (Sulphur) Cholera (Chlorine) Against (Argon) Potassium and Calcium remain unchanged.

Back in high school we went all the way to the first 50 elements and memorized all their properties. It wasn't fun back then because sometimes we get spanked for failing to recite correctly.

Image Source: ScienceNews.org

Today the periodic table isn't the same as back then. New elements have been added to the periodic table. In December 2015, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially recognized the discovery of elements 113, 115, 117 and 118, filling out the seventh row of the periodic table. On December 30, it announced that a Russian-U.S. collaboration had attained sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118. IUPAC awarded credit for the discovery of element 113 to scientists at RIKEN in Wako, Japan. Note that these elements are not naturally occurring, they were synthesized by slamming lighter nuclei into each other and tracking the decay of the radioactive superheavy elements that followed.

After a five-month review period and IUPAC approval, the names for new elements will become official. As is traditional in chemistry, the naming rights go to the discoverers. So in line with convention, the proposed names for the four elements are derived from scientists’ names and geographical locations of research institutes. 

Names of the elements

Element 113 will be called “nihonium" with chemical symbol Nh. Its name comes from the Japanese word “Nihon,” or “Land of the Rising Sun,” a name for Japan.

Element 115 is to be known as “moscovium,” shortened to Mc. It is named after the Moscow region, home to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, where the element was discovered in collaboration with researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The proposed name for element 117 is “tennessine,” after the home state of Oak Ridge, Vanderbilt University and the University of Tennessee. It will bear the symbol Ts.

Element 118 will be named oganesson, or Og, after Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian, who contributed to the discovery of several superheavy elements.

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