Author Archives: Elizabeth Hopper

Four names for four elements

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A week ago, the four new elements of the periodic table discovered in December 2015 were named: Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson, with the respective symbols Nh, Mc, Ts and Og respectively. These are elements 113, 115, 117 and 118, the final elements required to complete the table’s seventh row.

The names were proposed by the discoverers and accepted by IUPAC, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. They are now open for public review, to ensure that there are no chemicals currently given these names or symbols. This review is open for five months, until November 2016, and then the names will be formally approved by IUPAC. Elements can be named after a mythical concept, a mineral, a country, a property or a scientist. The associated symbol has to be completely unique and not be used for any other element, molecule or material.

Nihonium was discovered by a Japanese team at…

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Meteorites solve a mystery of life?

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In the lab, two chemical products are normally made. The product is a racemic mixture, meaning that it is composed of molecules which are structurally identical, but which are mirror images of each other. Mysteriously, in biological processes, only one of these mirror images is made.

The pair of mirror molecules are called enantiomers, and arise from the chirality of the molecule. If a molecule is chiral, its mirror image is not superimposable onto the original molecule. A reaction gives one or both mirror images, which are labelled right handed (D enantiomers) or left handed (L enantiomers). In nature, normally only the right handed version of any sugars, and the left handed enantiomer of any amino acids is made, allowing the reactions within the body to be so selective.

But where does this homochirality come from? Analysis…

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Alluring alloys: how thousands of new alloys can now be created

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Pure metals are made up of regular layers of atoms neatly stacked together. This means that the rows can easily slide past each other, so the metal is soft and not very useful. Normally harder materials, called alloys, are made by adding small amounts of other substances to disrupt the regular pattern and stop the rows from sliding so easily. These are used for many purposes, from weaponry to aircraft.

But what happens when many metals are mixed in roughly the same quantities? Well, this is what scientists at Ames Laboratory in Iowa are trying to determine. By mixing a number of different metals…

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Move over standard model – possible evidence for an unpredicted new particle found

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In July 2012, physicists at CERN announced something amazing – the discovery of the Higgs boson, a previously undetected particle predicted by the standard model. Now some more exciting and surprising evidence has come to light.

The Large Hadron Collider has been closed since December 2015 for maintenance, so scientists at CERN have been reanalysing their data, and have found something odd. A cluster of photons, or a diphoton excess, has been detected in a previously ignored energy range. It suggests…

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How scientists are going to find the new Pluto

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When Pluto lost its planetary status in 2006 it left a dark hole in our hearts. Luckily, the existence of another planet in our solar system was predicted in 1846, and recently it has started to seem like there might be enough evidence to support that prediction. A few months on, astronomers think they may have worked out a way to find it.

Mathematical modelling and computer simulations done by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at Caltech show that if a ninth planet does exist, it will explain the strange behaviour of six dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt, beyond Neptune. These dwarfs ‘clump together’, and have elliptical orbits tilted out of the plane of the rest of the solar system, which has a probability of occurring of just…

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Carbyne Creation: the world’s strongest material

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Carbyne, the world’s strongest known material, has always been elusive! For something so strong, it is very unstable, and its high reactivity has made it a challenge to create and isolate.

Scientists at the University of Vienna have now devised a method of mass producing carbyne. It can create stable chains 6,400 carbon atoms long, 64 times as long as the previous longest chain.

Carbyne is formally known as linear acetylenic carbon, a linear and infinitely long carbon chain. It is perfectly straight, due to its sp1 hybridisation, which means it can form alternating single and triple bonds to adjacent carbons. Considering hybridisation is a method of determining the…

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High Pressure Hydrogen: Predicted Metallic Phase is Almost Reached

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Hydrogen is a light, explosive gas at Earth’s atmospheric pressures, but in the centre of a gas giant such as Jupiter, scientists believe it exists in a metallic, superconducting phase.

Metallic hydrogen is thought to play a vital role in the inner workings of gas giants. In the centre of a gas giant, at pressures of over 4,500 million times the atmospheric pressure of Earth, hydrogen is metallic and is thought to be able to conduct electricity with zero resistance. In January, Physicists at the University of Edinburgh came close to recreating this phase on Earth, by compressing a micron cubed of hydrogen between two diamonds to pressures up to…

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DNA’s hidden talents: From Diodes to Data Storage

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Your DNA controls the structure of your whole body, how it works, and even who you are. It stores an immense amount of data, and it turns out that’s not all it can do.

Scientists from the Universities of Negev and Georgia have created a diode, an electronic component which allows current to flow in one direction, but stops it in the other, from DNA. It is only 11 base pairs long, and about 4 nm in length. What makes it so special is…

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Artificial intelligence wins again

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Artificial Intelligence, or AI to its friends, is growing fast and it seems like computers could take over at any minute. On March 19th 2016 AlphaGo, Google’s Go-playing program, spectacularly beat world champion Lee Se-dol in four out of five games. Has AI developed intuition, a key feature of the game, on top of everything else?

In Go, an ancient Chinese board game, players take turns to place black or white counters on a 19 x 19 square board to capture the opposition’s pieces and enclose territory. In a game there are typically a whopping…

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Quantum Dots: A tiny treatment for a massive killer

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Drug-resistant bacteria are growing ever more powerful and becoming common killers. Luckily, now a new method of treatment has recently emerged, which could kill up to 92% of these infections.

Quantum dots are tiny flecks of fluorescent semiconducting material, only 10-100 atoms in diameter. That translates to about a 20,000th of the width of a human hair! They may be small, but…

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