Darmstadt, June 10, 2009

The new element 112 discovered by GSI has been officially recognized and will be named by the Darmstadt group in due course. Their suggestion should be made public over this summer.

This picture (click it to enlarge) is a wordle. This shows the chemical elements in proportion to pages viewed for each on the WebElements periodic table web site. Hydrogen is the most viewed element. The question is, I suppose, is whether any useful information is conveyed? Read on....

I have restructured WebElements. The restructuring is all style at the front-end and reorganisation at the back-end, meaning all the errors in data are still there but they are displayed more beautifully and efficiently. Fixing some of those errors is now a priority.

Hard to know what to make of this as it is not my field. But here is a claim for element 122, or maybe 124, detection in thorium by a mass spectrometric method. The authors have claimed previously the observation of very heavy isotopes, for instance Rg isotopes in the mass spectra of natural gold (http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-ex/0702051).

Full reference

I would like to add that Erbium is used as a dopant in optical fiber amplifier for telecom wavelength (1500-1600 nm).
It is also used with a much more concentration in optical fibers for fibre laser.

I was wondering if any one out there could tell me a efficient way to produce photons. I want to produce lithium from beryllium [photon+Be=Li+H]. I know you can produce neutrons with aluminium or beryllium and a alpha emitter but I can not find a way to excite atoms to produce photons. I know if you run a electric arc across mecury vapor which discharge ultraviolet photons I'm wondering if these will do the same thing as normal photons if not what will.

The table in a bathroom

Modern surface chemistry – fuel cells, artificial fertilizers and clean exhaust

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2007 to Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany "for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces".

The 2007 Ig Nobel Chemistry prize winner was Mayu Yamamoto (International Medical Centre of Japan) for developing a way to extract vanillin (vanilla fragrance and flavour) from cow dung. The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced 5th October 2007 and prizes prizes awarded at Harvard in America. To celebrate, a local ice cream bar put on a tasting session of a new flavour, Yum-A-Moto Vanilla Twist, concocted in honour of the 2007 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Mayu Yamamoto. The mind boggles.