Science: Element 99

According to the Physical Review, a group of scientists at the University of California (Albert Ghiorso, G. Bernard Rossi, Bernard G. Harvey and Stanley G. Thompson) have created Element 99, the heaviest so far. They did it by bombarding Uranium 238 (Element 92) with a beam of positively charged nitrogen atoms from a 60-inch cyclotron. The nitrogen atoms contained seven protons and seven neutrons, and when they collided with U-238, all except five of the neutrons joined its nucleus. The seven added protons raised the atomic number to 99, and the added neutrons and protons together raised its atomic weight to...

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