Chemistry

• We're missing an atomThe periodic table remains one of the few markers of stability in the ever-changing world of scientific theory. So in 1999, it was with much fanfare that Kenneth Gregorich, a nuclear chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his colleagues announced that they had discovered two new elements not in the table. By crashing krypton particles into a chunk of lead, they had created element 118 and the element into which it rapidly decayed, element 116. (The numbers 118 and 116 refer to how many protons are in the nucleus of the atoms.) It was with less of a flourish that they retracted their claim last July. After two years of futile attempts to reproduce the elusive atoms, Gregorich and his team reanalyzed their data and discovered that there was no "there" there. The decay chains they thought they had seen, from element 118 to ...