New element’s name lodged
ATEAM of Japanese scientists has proposed naming atomic element 113 nihonium — after “Nihon”, meaning Japan — and giving it the symbol Nh. While Kyushu University professor Kosuke Morita, who led the team that created the element, said synthesising a new element will be of no practical use for daily life, the feat is still significant.
It is the first element to be discovered in an Asian country and will also be permanently put on the periodic table to be taught in schools throughout the world.
We hope that the creation of nihonium will rouse Japanese children’s interest in science and thus help spawn future scientists, and remind the government of the importance of bolstering the foundation for the nation’s basic research. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has opened the proposed names of four newly created elements, including nihonium, to a five-month public review.
The three other elements are element 115, with the proposed name moscovium and symbol Mc; element 117 as tennessine (Ts); and element 118 as oganesson (Og).
The first two were created through a collaboration between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — all three in the US — and the third through a collaboration between the Russian institute and the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.
Past experience shows that names proposed by the creators usually become official.
An element is a group of substances, each having an identical number of protons in the nucleus. In the periodic table, elements are arranged in the order of the number of protons in each element. Element 1 is hydrogen, element 2 helium, element 3 lithium and element 4 beryllium.
In 1908, the late Masataka Ogawa, who tried to find a new element during his two years of research in Britain, announced after coming back to Japan that he had discovered element 43 and named it nipponium. But his claim was later found to be wrong.
Elements through No 92 (uranium) exist stably in nature. Element 93 and thereafter have been artificially created in laboratories from 1940.
We should bear in mind what Morita said about the creation of new elements — that historically, behind their creation was the development of atomic bombs. Tokyo, June 25.