Step one: Make your own element
(NEWSER) - With two new elements on the periodic table this month, NPR offers a step-by-step tutorial on how you, too, can add an element—if you’ve got an atom-smashing device lying around. First, you have to make a new element by slamming atoms of two elements together and hoping their nuclei join. “These two species combine perhaps once out of a billion billion collisions,” notes a scientist (who happens to be chair of the Joint Working Party for the Discovery of New Elements). "That's a billion billion." If you get really, really lucky, you’ve created a new element. More»
