One could be forgiven for thinking that the periodic table of chemical elements is a dusty relic with nothing new to say. Today the periodic table is more commonly found in textbooks than newspapers. Yet it was only in 2016 that the latest additions to the table were officially named. Clearly, the periodic table still has more tales to tell.
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The periodic table catalogues the basic ingredients that make up you, me and the world around us. While a chemical compound like carbon dioxide can be broken down into carbon and oxygen, elements like carbon and oxygen cannot be simplified any further because elements are the fundamental types of chemicals in the universe. So far we have tallied 118 of them.
In the early days of chemistry, finding new elements meant digging them out of the ground or otherwise isolating them from the natural world. One of the most remarkable discoveries occurred near a village called Ytterby in Sweden. The elements yttrium, erbium, terbium and ytterbium are all named after the Ytterby mine. Numerous other elements also owe their discovery to the minerals first unearthed in Ytterby.
However, elements heavier than uranium almost never occur in the natural world and won't be found by digging. These "transuranic" elements are all radioactive and rapidly decay into lighter elements, some lasting just a fraction of a second before they fall apart. For this reason, the transuranic elements were first discovered by making them in laboratories, often by colliding two lighter elements together to produce a heavier new element.
As its name suggests, the periodic table is characterised by periodicity (repeating patterns).
Based on these patterns, the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev famously anticipated the existence and properties of several elements before they had been discovered in reality. Now all of the gaps in the periodic table have been filled. The only place to go from here is a new row (an eighth row) on the bottom of the table.
Both theoretical and experimental scientists continue to grapple with the question of whether we will find any new elements. However, if the completion of the seventh row of the periodic table is anything to go by, populating the eighth row with even a single new member will be a tremendously challenging task. Finding a new element will be anything but elementary.
Response by: Jarrod Green, freelance science writer.
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