[HN Gopher] First Ever Measurements of Einsteinium
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       First Ever Measurements of Einsteinium
        
       Author : oedmarap
       Score  : 51 points
       Date   : 2021-02-08 10:39 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.sciencedaily.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedaily.com)
        
       | JoeAltmaier wrote:
       | In some science fiction, life forms exist at a much higher rate
       | of thought and action than we do. I like to imagine such folks
       | could make practical use of a metal that lasts only 250 days.
       | Perhaps as part of exotic thrusters for space travel etc.
        
         | at_a_remove wrote:
         | I like to spend some time really considering ideas like these.
         | 
         | Manufacturing these atom by atom would be a tremendous pain, so
         | either the element (or compounds thereof) would have some
         | extremely rewarding properties for its manufacture _or_ one
         | could posit a deposit of something with a reasonably long half-
         | life occurring during the  "right kind" of supernova or other
         | highly energetic phenomena -- something rare that might foster
         | competition.
         | 
         | The _properties_ of these elements, well, as you climb up the
         | table, you get more and more relativistic effects from these
         | super-heavy nuclei (the electrons end up  "moving" -- inasmuch
         | as something can be moving in a QM sense in the electron cloud
         | -- rather quickly), and the elements become more and more
         | metallic. Covalent bonds would "lose" the relativistic effect,
         | and I do not think that many of the compounds themselves would
         | have properties that could not be replicated with something
         | cheaper, but ... there's exactly one area where I do hold out
         | some kind of hope: metastable nuclear isomers.
         | 
         | Elements sufficiently far into the island (or even _continent_
         | ) of stability would have many typical modes of decay
         | restricted, and highly-deformed nuclei (some we can find even
         | now are shaped like pears, they are so lopsided), that they
         | might have very restricted methods available to store and
         | release energy. In short, nuclear batteries. We haven't had
         | much luck with those down in the "regular" elements but if I
         | had to come up with a decent sci-fi reason to want many
         | megagrams of MacGuffinonium, the bizarre properties of the
         | nuclei enabling nuclear batteries -- with shocking power
         | densities -- would certainly be eligible at least in a hand-
         | wavy sense.
        
         | ars wrote:
         | They would have to be very small. The speed of light doesn't
         | change, just because they are thinking faster.
         | 
         | But if they are small, they are far more limited in how complex
         | they can be, then they have fewer atoms to work with.
         | 
         | If they are small, then they have issues seeing light, which
         | needs a certain size detector. And you can't just increase the
         | frequency of light (to get smaller photons), because higher
         | frequency light ionizes atoms and damages chemical bonds (or
         | does right through).
         | 
         | > exotic thrusters
         | 
         | The speed of thermal conduction in a material isn't any faster
         | either. So again, you would need something very small.
        
       | dandare wrote:
       | Reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
        
         | gallerdude wrote:
         | Wait - the island of stability can be for more than a year?
         | That's mindblowing. I wonder what the properties of these huge
         | elements are.
        
           | perardi wrote:
           | Very heavy elements tend to "break" the periodicity of the
           | periodic table a bit, because there are so many inner-shell
           | electrons shielding the nucleus, and because of odd
           | relativistic effects.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry
        
       | mnw21cam wrote:
       | And awaiting a Derek Lowe article on this in 3, 2, 1...
        
       | seeekr wrote:
       | Bond length seems to be the only thing that has been measured in
       | the efforts described in the article. I would have skipped
       | reading the article if it had been clear about that from the
       | beginning.
        
         | xadhominemx wrote:
         | In super heavy nuclear chemistry, the really hard part is
         | sample purification and preparation. Now that they've figured
         | out how to do some of that bit, doing additional experiments
         | with more material will be much easier.
        
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