New element in the periodic table.

A team of American and Russian scientists have discovered an element with the periodic number 118! It lasted only for a thousandth of a second, but it will mot probably become the latest element in the periodic table.

Some excerpts...

Element 118 would fit comfortably just below radon in a column of the periodic table containing what are called noble gases for their inert chemical properties.

Apparently others have previously claimed to have found the element, but it turned out to be a fraudulent case...

The results were met with praise but also caution from other scientists in the field, particularly given the fraught history of element 118. Another California lab, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, announced that it discovered the element in 1999 but retracted the claim two years later after an investigation found that one of its researchers, Dr. Victor Ninov, had fabricated data. Dr. Ninov was later fired.

This current team of scientists have their detractors too, as they have made claims to have found elements 113, 114, 115, 116, and now 118. The problems lies in the fact that these measurements are extremely difficult to reproduce.

But here is the exciting part...

The scientists said their results also gave hope that they were approaching a long-predicted “island of stability” of even heavier elements, with longer lives and possibly strange new chemical properties.

Apparently the search is on for the next "magic number" nucleus in the field...

But the theorists have predicted that there is another closed shell out beyond all elements discovered so far, including the latest one.
...
There is general agreement that the next neutron magic number is 184. But that is still out of reach of current experiments.

Well, looks like with all the talk about magic numbers we are truly on our way to an age of fantastical elements and weird properties...