February 20, 2004

Periodic Table? Get Me Rewrite!

A Russian-American team creates a pair of new elements

By Richard Monastersky

Publishing companies are having a hard time keeping their periodic tables up to date these days. In the past decade, labs around the world have been adding new boxes to the end of the venerable chart at a speed that exceeds the work of Marie Curie or the bomb-building frenzy of the 1940s and 1950s.

And in a demonstration of how much the world has changed since the cold war, Russian and American researchers announced late last month that they had collaborated in an effort to create the