Call it Element 117, for now. An international team of scientists was able to generate six atoms of the stuff for a few millionths of a second — long enough to add one new element to the periodic table.

Christian Science Monitor:

Let’s hear it for element 117, the last holdout in the last row of the periodic table. An international team of physicists reports that it has produced the element – fleetingly – in an atom smasher in Russia.

The discovery brings to 26 the number of so-called transuranic elements scientists have uncovered – elements that extend the periodic table beyond uranium. Element 117, which has yet to receive a formal name, is the fifth new element scientists have discovered in the past decade.

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