Creating new heavy elements is a scientific tour de force that gets harder and harder as the easier possibilities are knocked off the list. When Chemist Paul R. Fields of the Argonne National Laboratory got into the game last year, all the elements above uranium (No. 92 and nature's heaviest) through element No. 101 (mendelevium) had already been synthesized.*He knew that the next candidate, element No. 102, would be the toughest yet. Last week, in a joint release of Argonne, Britain's Harwell laboratory and Sweden's Nobel Institute for Physics, a U.S.-British-Swedish team sparked...
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