I’m Hank Green, welcome to SciShow News, where where it’s starting to seem like:
Another year, another element!
You hardcore SciShow News hounds know that new elements are constantly being created
-- if fleetingly -- and then tested, and verified, in labs around the world.
In 2012, two new elements were added to the periodic table: flerovium, otherwise known
as number 114, and livermorium, 116.
And just last August, a team in Germany managed to produce element 115.
Now, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have confirmed the creation of
yet another element, with the atomic number 117.
They started by creating an isotope of the element berkelium -- that alone took a year
and a half -- and then bombarded it with isotopes of calcium, until … blammo.
Now, all of the elements after uranium, which is atomic number 92, are unstable, which means
that their nuclei don’t have the proper balance of neutrons and protons.
So unstable nuclei can break apart, or decay, in an effort to rebalance those numbers of
protons and neutrons.
And the new, super-heavy elements that are made using particle colliders -- the ones
that have atomic numbers over 110 -- all decay in a matter of milliseconds.
So...why do we keep making them?!
Well, I'll be honest: partly, it's prestige.
It's not a coincidence that 15 new elements were discovered during the Cold War, and some
of them have names like 'Americium.'
But creating these superheavy elements also teaches us about the structure of the atomic
nucleus.
We now have reason to believe that protons and neutrons are arranged in shells, just
like electrons, and that some of these shell configurations are more stable than others.
And this has led many chemists to believe that there’s a so-called 'island of stability,'
where isotopes of super-heavy elements might have half-lives of anywhere from between thirty
seconds, to several million years.
If you’ve ever played Call of Duty then you probably don’t need me to explain all
this.
But in real-lifey, science-non-fiction, we haven't managed to make any of these stable,
super-heavy atoms yet.
In the future, we probably will.
Because, keep in mind, just one proton makes the difference between, like, gold and mercury,
which are pretty different.
Try making a Swiss watch out of mercury, or a thermometer with gold.
We can't even imagine what properties these new, man-made elements might have.
Meanwhile, a different kind of discovery in Canada has taught us an unexpected lesson
-- about the science of exploding whales.
Two weeks ago, the carcass of a dead blue whale washed ashore near the town of Trout
River, Newfoundland -- all 25 meters of it -- and it quickly began to inflate to twice
its original, living girth.
It didn't explode.
But it probably would have, if somebody had come along and poked a hole in its gut.
And people have observed whale carcasses exploding before, forming specular showers of blood
and viscera.
Probably the most famous whale-explosion is the one that had the most witnesses -- In
2004, a dead, 60-ton sperm whale was being trucked to a lab for study, going through
the busy streets of Tainan, Taiwan, when… thar she blew.
So, why?
Well, when a while dies, its viscera start to decompose.
As its guts rot, the bacteria that do the rotting produce huge volumes of gases, like
methane and hydrogen sulfide.
This happens to most animals that have guts.
You're probably going to bloat as well when you die.
By the way, I probably should have told you to not eat anything while watching this episode.
What's special about whales is they're big, which means there’s a lot of stuff to rot.
And remember we’re talking about a blue whale here -- the biggest animal in the HISTORY
OF EVER, and they can reach up to 200 tons in weight.
They're also watertight: which, they'd kind of have to be, to keep their insides on the
inside when they dive deep underwater.
They have a thick layer of blubber that keeps them from...popping … under the intense
pressures of the deep.
So as animals go, a whale makes a particularly good balloon.
And that expanding gas inside the whale can build up to around two to three atmospheres
of pressure!
But the rules of fluid dynamics dictate that the gas wants to escape by the path of least
resistance.
And since it's the whale's guts we’re talking about, the path of least resistance is going
to be out its mouth...or…possibly the other end.
But if you were to cut a hole in the whale before it deflates...yeah, the whale is gonna
explode all up in your face.
So, I don’t know why you need me to tell you this, but stay away from dead things.
Don't poke holes in corpses.
Any corpses, not just whale corpses.
But especially whale corpses.
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow News, brought to you by Audible, which is
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In 1917, we figured out how to count up elements by atomic number 1 to 92, but seven of them
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