Four new elements that have been added to the periodic table, completing its seventh row, according to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).
Now comes the fun part - picking names for them. Hopefully, they will look beyond naming them after Johnny Depp or a Keith Richards. In the meantime, they are being called ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).
It's not even trivial to identify them as elements.
"A particular difficulty in establishing these new elements is that they decay into hitherto unknown isotopes of slightly lighter elements that also need to be unequivocally identified,” commented fourth IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party (JWP) chair Professor Paul J. Karol, “but in the future we hope to improve methods that can directly measure the atomic number, Z."
