Scientists Fill In The Periodic Table A Little, Bask In The Glow This weeks news from the world of chemistry gives new meaning to whipping up something in the lab. No, the science crazy sorts did not invent a woman, or some reasonable facsimile, they quite literally invented, uh, discovered four new elements, and added them to the Periodic Table. The elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added. The four were verified on 30 December by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the global organisation that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement. IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118. The body awarded credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the Riken institute inJapan. This was The Guardians version. CNN gave away the true secret of the invention, uh, discoveries: With the words decay extremely quickly it can be extrapolated that the quartet are radioactive, or at least start out that way. (113 is said to be more radioactive than Plutonium.) That they fill in the seventh row of the Periodic Table makes them heavy. Anything at the bottom is a heavy atom, in this case superheavy. (Gases go across the top, as do natural elements that make up the building blocks of life. Lighter than air and all that.) That they arent naturalwho cares. Chemists are on to elements 119 and 120 which dont exist yet. The four new colors, oops, elements are ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118), although those will not be their real names until theInternational Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) finalizes the names. Exactly what these elements will be used for is anyones guess. In the meantime, the scientific community is positively orgasmic at the development that is considered on par with Olympic gold metals, and one would have to assume, sex. At least their good news has nothing to do with the Kardashians. 