In a vacuum-sealed flask on a lab bench in Germany sits an emerald-green crystal that will cause some jaws to drop. The crystal is the first stable compound containing a triple chemical bond between two boron atoms, a feat that had previously been limited to only two other non-metal elements – [...]
IUPAC has officially approved the name flerovium, with symbol Fl, for the element of atomic number 114 and the name livermorium, with symbol Lv, for the element of atomic number 116. Priority for the discovery of these elements was assigned, in accordance with the agreed criteria, to the collaboration between the [...]
O. Hai from the Institute for Theoretical Experiments and I. B. Hakkenshit from the Chemistry Department of Miskatonic University present a new method of synthesizing pseudoephedrine (e.g. Sudafed):
While in the past many stores were able to sell pseudoephedrine, new laws in the United States have restricted sales to pharmacies, with the medicine kept behind the [...]
“[A] diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel” would be nothing compared to this:
Neutron stars form from the core of a collapsing star and, as the supernova dissipates, often rotate rapidly, creating a pulsar. In less than a million years, however, their strong magnetic fields act as a brake, slowing them [...]
Carbon-14 decays with a half-life of 5730 years, so it is often used to date objects up to about 50,000 years old (anything older would have negligible amounts of the stuff). But most other atoms that decay in the same way—by converting one of their neutrons into a proton—disappear in less than a day. [...]
A new method for determining temperature using isotopes is now being applied to dinosaurs, and promises to provide hard data that could advance the debate [over whether dinosaurs were endothermic or ecothermic]. This new method, called “clumped isotope thermometry,” is based on the tendency of a heavier isotope of carbon (13C) to preferentially bond with [...]
[P]rocesses, called cryptic variation and preadaptation, involve mutations that don’t affect an organism when they first occur, and are initially exempt from pressures of natural selection. As they gather, however, at some later date, they could combine to form the basis for complex, unpredictable new traits. In the new study, the ability of evolving, [...]
Elements 114 and 116 have been officially added to the periodic table[.] … The researchers forged the new heavy elements by slamming together the nuclei of lighter atoms at an accelerator at [the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research Dubna, Russia and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California].
They made element 116 by bombarding targets made [...]
A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has detected six isotopes, never seen before, of the superheavy elements 104 through 114. Starting with the creation of a new isotope of the yet-to-be-named element 114, the researchers observed successive emissions of alpha particles that [...]
A team of astronomers has found that in the dusty environment around a white dwarf star lying about 6500 light years from Earth, a few per cent of the carbon is in the form of buckyballs. The astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope to detect the distinctive infrared spectrum of buckyballs made of 60 and [...]