Sadly this is not the publication of research already done, but what was being talked about in a presentation at the American Chemical Societies 235 national meeting. Basically what they say is that there could be another “Island of stability” where artificial super-heavy elements could exist.

The period table, as you probably know, consists of all the atoms in the universe, with 92 of them being naturally found, while the rest is created by smashing atoms together, and they are usually very unstable, falling apart within tiny fractions of a second. There are however artificial elements that are stable, and even very practical, such as Americium, which is used in smoke detectors among other things.

As you can see in this picture below, there is a so called “Island of stability”, a sweet spot if you will, where the atoms will stay stable. They are now predicting that another one of these Islands could exist even further away (a guess in the report says that it might be at around 164 (118 is the biggest atom created so far).

So what does this give us? We have no idea really. At the moment it’s just exciting research, but as you can see with Americium it is possible that these heavy, artificially created elements can be very useful.