Four New Elements Completes The Seventh Row of The Period Table, International Union of Pure and Applied Science Confirms

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), an internationally-recognized organization that has authority on chemical sciences, announced recently about the existence of four new elements to be included permanently in the Periodic Table of Elements.

The organization has given formal recognition to the newly discovered Elements 118,117, 115, and 113, which will fill in the seventh-row elements of the table. These elements are temporarily named as Ununoctium (Uuo 118), Ununseptium (Uus 117), Ununpentium (Uup 115), andUnuntium (Uut 113).

Jan Reedjik, Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC president, said the entire "chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row." He added that IUAPC is now taking further steps to formalize the names and symbols of these elements.

According to the recently published article by Lin Taylor for CNN, the existences of the four new elements are perceived to be "synthetically created in laboratories" and scientists are having a difficult time reproducing them because of their quick decaying process.

Meanwhile, the group of scientists who discovered the elements is already coming up with a proposal for their individual names and symbols. However, the plans will still be subject to checking by IUPAC's Inorganic Chemistry Division to ensure their consistency, language translatability, and possible historical usage among others. IUPAC remarked that their names might be named after a scientist, property, mythological concept, mineral, or a country. Should this be completed, the symbols and names will be presented to a five-month long public review.

With respect to their discoveries, the element 113 was discovered by a team of Japanese researchers while elements 115,117 and 118 were identified by a team of Russian-American scientist at Dubna's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"Now that we have conclusively demonstrated the existence of element 113, we plan to look at the uncharted territory of element 119 and beyond," said Japan's RIKEN group Lead Researcher, Kosuke Morita.