How to discover a new element
(PhysOrg.com) -- It is not the same as it used to be, the element finding business. We have discovered and named all the elements from hydrogen (element 1) up to element 112 (copernicium)[1], and last week IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry - it does to elements what the International Astronomical Union did to Pluto), the world governing body for chemistry, has announced the confirmation of a couple more. After bismuth (element 83) the elements are no longer regarded as 'stable' and so the atoms tend not to hang around. Admittedly the definition of stable means that the half-life (the time it takes for half a sample to disappear by radioactive decay) must be more than 10 billion years, so we can still find elements like uranium (element 92) on the Earth.