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4 New Elements Are Added To the Periodic Table

For now, they're known by working names, like ununseptium and ununtrium – two of the four new chemical elements whose discovery has been officially verified. The elements with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 will get permanent names soon, according to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

With the discoveries now confirmed, "The 7th period of the periodic table of elements is complete," according to the IUPAC. The additions come nearly five years after elements 114 and 116 were added to the table.

The elements were discovered in recent years by researchers in Japan, Russia, and the United States. Element 113 was discovered by a group at the Riken Institute, which calls it "the first element on the periodic table found in Asia."

Three other elements were discovered by a collaborative effort among the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The new elements' existence was then confirmed by further experiments that reproduced them – however briefly. Element 113, for instance, exists for less than a thousandth of a second.

"A particular difficulty in establishing these new elements is that they decay into hitherto unknown isotopes of slightly lighter elements that also need to be unequivocally identified," said Paul Karol, chair of the IUPAC's Joint Working Party, announcing the new elements. His group also includes members of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

The elements' temporary names stem from their spot on the periodic table – for instance, ununseptium has 117 protons. Each of the discovering teams have now been asked to submit names for the new elements.

International guidelines for choosing a name say new elements "can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist," according to the IUPAC.

In 2013, Swedish scientists confirmed the existence of the Russian-discovered ununpentium (atomic number 117). As the Two-Way described it, the element was produced by "shooting a beam of calcium, which has 20 protons, into a thin film of americium, which has 95 protons. For less than a second, the new element had 115 protons."

While you're not likely to run into the new elements anytime soon, they're not the only ones with have short existences. Take, for instance, francium (atomic number 87) and astatine (atomic number 85).

As Sam Kean, author of a book about the periodic table called The Disappearing Spoon, wrote of those elements:

"If you had a million atoms of the longest-lived type of astatine, half of them would disintegrate in 400 minutes. A similar sample of francium would hang on for 20 minutes. Francium is so fragile, it's basically useless."

As for why scientists keep pursuing new and heavier elements, the answer, at least in part, is that they're hoping to eventually find an element – or a series of elements – that are both stable and useful in practical applications. And in the meantime, they can learn more about how atoms are held together. npr

'Becoming Nicole' Recounts One Family's Acceptance Of Their Transgender Child

When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin boys, Jonas and Wyatt, at birth in 1997, they were thrilled at the idea of having two sons. For a while, it was virtually impossible to tell the boys apart. But as they grew older, one child, Wyatt, started insisting that he was a girl.

"I [was] like, 'Hmm, I've got twins but one's not like the other. They're very different,' " Kelly Maines, the twins' mother, tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on: ... Is she gay? Is she transvestite? Is she transgender? I honestly had no experience in understanding what any of that meant."

Over the course of several years, Kelly and Wayne began to accept that one of the twins was transgender. They had Wyatt's name changed to Nicole and began buying her dolls and girls' clothes, which she had been asking for.

Wayne acknowledges that it wasn't always easy. He worried about what the neighbors would think, but those concerns faded when Nicole began being bullied and harassed. "When people start coming after your kid, you get your head right: 'This is my baby. Don't mess with my kids.' That's probably when I turned a corner," he says.

The Maines went on to file a discrimination lawsuit against Nicole's school district, which they won on appeal last year. This year, Nicole and her twin brother, Jonas, graduated from high school and Nicole had gender reassignment surgery.

Together with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Ellis Nutt, Wayne and Kelly Maines tell their family's story in the new book, Becoming Nicole. Nutt joins Kelly and Wayne Maines in the studio to discuss the book and how biology affects gender identity.

On Wayne's initial reaction to Nicole insisting she wanted to be a girl
Wayne Maines: I tried to influence it in other ways, you know, you meet Nicole, even at that age, extremely strong personality. If I would say to her, 'You don't want to be a girl,' she'd say, 'Yes I do.' I'm a 40-year-old guy having this debate with this little kid and I'm losing, you know? It was hard. ... You have this vision of what you think the American dream is and your family, and it's not what it is. I've learned more from my two children and Kelly than I ever thought possible. I learned that everybody needs to be who they need to be, and I learned that people, little children, know who they are at that age.

On Kelly taking the lead on accepting Nicole
Kelly Maines: Back then ... the popular way of proceeding was gender neutral, try to keep her gender neutral. But Nicole did not like that at all. It took a while. I think it was about when she was 7 ... we had a birthday party for her and Jonas and we gave her all the boys toys ... and she was very unhappy and I looked at Wayne and I said, 'That's it. I'm not doing this anymore. It's not working. She's angry. She's doubting herself. This is not healthy. She has to have a safe place here.' So we took the toys back and we got her some mermaid things, and she was very, very happy with that and about then that's when I was like, 'This is crazy. I just gotta do what's gonna make this kid the best person she can be.' ...

I would be in those aisles in Target with girl's clothes like, "I wish I could get this for her, for Wyatt. I know Wyatt would love this. I can't. I can't." Or sometimes I would [buy the girl's clothes] and it would be like, "These are your home clothes. These are your school clothes." It just got so much better when we finally said, "Enough. You can like it or leave it: This kid is who they are."

For a parent, too, when you do finally make that turn, the biggest fears are she's gonna get hurt. Somebody's not gonna like it. And when we ended up having our problems the anger [of others toward Nicole] was the thing that was so shocking.

On the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders]changing gender identity disorder to gender identity dysphoria in 2013,and the significance of that change
Nutt: I think the most important thing is that it changes the view of gender identity, or of an anomalous gender identity, as being somehow abnormal. It's not a disorder. The problem for kids, for transgender people, isn't within, it's without. In other words, their trouble with their gender identity comes essentially because others view them one way when they view themselves another. Nicole, for instance, even as Wyatt, always described herself as a "boy-girl," or a "girl-boy." She was completely confident in who she was. She knew that she was a girl, but she also knew that people referred to her as a boy and that she had a boy anatomy. So this was a child who was never unsure of who she was, but she knew there was a problem with how other people and the rest of the world viewed her. And that's where the dysphoria comes in — when there's a mismatch between what we expect and what, perhaps, the sexual anatomy says, and what the brain is telling us.

On how gender anatomy, sexuality and identity are set prenatally
Nutt: In the first six weeks our gender anatomy, our sexual anatomy, is set. Essentially we all begin in life asexual and then certain genes and hormones kick in, and our sexual anatomy is determined to either have male genitalia and male reproductive organs, or female. However, scientists are learning that while that happens at six weeks, it's not until six months that the brain masculinizes or feminizes. That is, that the hormones in the brain determine is this the brain of a girl or is this the brain of a boy? Sexual orientation, they're also discovering, is a third process, but what they're really focusing on is trying to understand that they're not all congruent.

Normally, prenatally we develop along the same lines, that our sexual anatomy matches up with our gender identity, but what they've discovered is that there's a space in-between. There are weeks in-between in pre-natal development when many things can happen. We know that many things can influence the environment of the womb and the environment of the womb influences the level of hormones and the chemicals that go into the development of a fetus. And so there are many things that can happen between the time that a fetus' sexual identity is set and their gender identity is set.

On how gender identity is in the brain
Nutt: Identical twins obviously have the exact same DNA. What they don't have is the exact same epigenome, which means not all of the genetic switches are turned off and on in identical ways. ... The explanation for that, scientists give, is that in the womb identical twins have separate amniotic sac[s] and umbilical cord[s] and therefore they get various and different amounts of hormones and nourishment. And they've discovered that even your placement in the womb — where you are located in the womb — for identical twins can affect the ratio of hormones and nutrients that you get, and, therefore, it is a different environment. The environment affects who we are, our gender identity, and the environment of the womb, even the top of the womb, the lower part of the womb, can affect how the brain is set, even in identical twins.

On the fluidity of gender
Nutt: Gender isn't something that's necessarily fixed, that it's dynamic, that it's fluid. ... There are very few people that are 100 percent totally masculine or 100 percent totally feminine. We have traits of both, and so, ordinarily, it's something in between. I think, people are feeling more comfortable now saying, "Yeah, I've never felt 100 percent masculine, but I'm mostly masculine." And, I think, it has become a more comfortable society to say that in. But I think it's also because the science is now supporting that. npr

Evolution of whale tails. Follow the whale. 1956

Jacopo Berengario da Carpi

Jacopo Berengario da Carpi: Isagogae breues, perlucidae ac uberrimae, in anatomiam humani corporis a communi medicorum academia usitatam

How 'One Nation' Didn't Become 'Under God' Until The '50s Religious Revival

The words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase "In God we trust" on the back of a dollar bill haven't been there as long as most Americans might think. Those references were inserted in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, the same decade that the National Prayer Breakfast was launched, according to writer Kevin Kruse. His new book is One Nation Under God.

In the original Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy made no mention of God, Kruse says. Bellamy was Christian socialist, a Baptist who believed in the separation of church and state.

"As this new religious revival is sweeping the country and taking on new political tones, the phrase 'one nation under God' seizes the national imagination," Kruse tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It starts with a proposal by the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic lay organization, to add the phrase 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance. Their initial campaign doesn't go anywhere but once Eisenhower's own pastor endorses it ... it catches fire." npr

a history of money and power at the vatican

For decades, the Catholic Church has been dogged by scandals involving money. Vatican City — a sovereign state — controls its own finances through the Vatican Bank. It developed as a cross between the Federal Reserve and an offshore bank. In a new history, God's Bankers, Gerald Posner explains that its roots go back to the mid-19th century.

"They had 15,000 square miles of what was central Italy with thousands of subjects," Posner tells NPR's Renee Montagne. "They levied taxes and paid for this lavish lifestyle — with 700 servants and a big and growing bureaucracy around them. Then, in 1870, Italy's nationalists have a revolution. They throw the Pope out, they get rid of the papal states. The Vatican goes from being an empire — an earthly empire — to a little postage-stamp size of property called Vatican City."

By World War II, the church had sizable investments and created the Vatican Bank in order to hide its financial dealings with the Nazis from the U.S. and the U.K.

"I was surprised the extent to which the Vatican was deeply embedded with German companies," Posner says. "They bundled together life insurance policies of Jewish refugees who had been sent to Auschwitz and other death camps. They escheated these policies early on — meaning they took the cash value of them."

Later, when the surviving children or grandchildren of the victims tried to collect on the insurance policies, they were refused.

"These insurance companies would refuse to pay out saying: 'Show us a death certificate,' which they knew was impossible," Posner explains. "They would keep the money."

In God's Bankers, Posner sheds light on what he calls "the blood money" that came into the church.

On the Vatican being "equal opportunity profiteers"

It wasn't as though they did business with the Germans because they wanted the Germans to win. They did business with everyone, because they called themselves neutral and decided that somebody would win at the end of the war — and they were going to keep their business connections open to everybody. Then, when they saw the war was going against the Germans, they started to hide the connections. And after the war they said, "We didn't do anything wrong."

On how the Church knew what the Nazis were doing but were "frozen by indecision and fear"

The bank officials and those who ran the bank knew very little because, in part, all they wanted to know was what was happening in terms of the war effort and what was happening in terms of business and profits.

But on the church end, there's no doubt that they had churches, local churches in all of the countries, that were the ground zeros for the killing zones. The local priests who were not in favor of the slaughter still reported back to their bishops what was happening on the ground. That came in daily reports, and they had unfortunately a very clear sense of what was happening early on.

They were just frozen by indecision and fear. They were afraid that if they spoke out, the Nazis might in fact move against Catholics in Germany and even move against the Pope and take him back to Germany as a prisoner. But that fear meant that they abdicated their moral position as the head of the world's largest religion, especially at a time that they continued to make money with the people committing the murder. npr

Senate Says Climate Change Real, But Not Really Our Fault

Breathtakingly broad as its jurisdiction may be, the U.S. Senate does not usually vote on the validity of scientific theories.

This week, it did. And science won. The Senate voted that climate change is real, and not a hoax. The vote was 98-1.

The vote was about an amendment to the bill approving the Keystone XL pipeline project. The near unanimity of the climate change judgment was notable, because so many senators have cast doubt on ideas of "global warming."

Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a former mayor of Tulsa and longtime friend to the oil industry, even has a book out entitled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.

But, to the surprise of many, Inhofe actually voted for the "not a hoax" amendment offered by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island.

Of course, Inhofe could do that and then vote against another, later amendment attributing climate change to human activity. (Relax, Tulsa, Sen. Inhofe has not changed his stripes.)

"The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant [as] to think they are so powerful that they can change climate," Inhofe said in a speech on the Senate floor. "Man cannot change climate."

As it turned out, the only vote against the "real and not a hoax" language was cast by Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

dodo bird

Plate V in: Hugh Edwin Strickland, The Dodo And Its Kindred, Or The History, Affinities, And Osteology Of The Dodo, Solitaire, And Other Extinct Birds Of The Islands Mauritius, Rodriguez, and Bourbon. London: Reeve, 1848.

deep sea fishes

foraminifera of great britain

On the recent Foraminifera of Great Britain. By William Crawford Williamson byThe Ernst Mayr Library on Flickr.

Kenneth Turan's Top 54 Films

MOVIES IN KENNETH TURAN’S NEW BOOK:

“Not to be Missed: Fifty

-

Four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film”

1920s

Fantomas

Sherlock, Jr.

Pass the Gravy

1930s

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

Bombshell

The Dybbuk

Make Way for Tomorrow

Love Affair

1940s

Pride and Prejudice

The Shop Around the Corner

To Be or Not to Be

The Lady Eve

Strawberry Blonde

Casablanca

Random Harvest

Children of Paradise

Great Expectations

Bicycle Thieves

The Third Man

1950s

All About Eve

The Asphalt Jungle

Sunset Boulevard

Casque d’Or

The Importance of Being Earnest

Singin’ in the Rain

The Earrings of Madame De

Seven Samurai

Kiss Me Deadly

Seven Men from Now

Sweet Smell of Success

Vertigo

1960s

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Point Blank

Le Samourai

Kes

1970s

The Godfather

Chinatown

1980s

The Day After Trinity

First Contact

Distant Voices, Still Lives

1990s

Howards End

Leolo

Unforgiven

2000s

Spirited Away

The Best of Youth

The Five Obstructions

Stranded

Senna

A Prophet

Of Gods and Men

Footnote

natural history of mammals

Natural History of Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians, Fish, Marine Life, Insects ; By Jonstonus, Joannes, 1603-1675 Bayer, Frederick M., Burndy Library, Godman, Frederick Du Cane, 1834-1919 Jonstonus, Joannes, 1603-1675 on Flickr.

johann zahn

Johann Zahn. Specula Physico-Mathematico-Historica Notabilium ac Mirabilium Sciendorum. Nuremberg: Johann Christoph Lochner, 1696.

Histoire naturelle de Lacépède :. Paris : Furne, Jouvet et cie ; Jouvet et cie, succ., 1876-1881..

Field guide to the most common monsters of the late 1500s.

Prodigiosae species monstrorum (Amazing Monsters), 1575, Gerard Janssen van Kampen and Antoine van Leest, printmakers. Woodcut in De naturae diuinis characterismis… by Cornelius Gemma. The Getty Research Institute

19th century bird paintings from china

Album Containing Twelve Paintings of Birds. China, C19th. (via The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

1838 platypus and friends

Compléments de Buffon. t.1.

Paris :P. Pourrat Frères,1838.

biodiversitylibrary.org/page/16008005

Some of the Earliest Maps of Stonehenge, Made by a Druid-Obsessed English Vicar

These maps and illustrations appeared in British antiquarian and vicar William Stukeley’s 1740 book, Stonehenge, A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids. Harvard’s Widener Library has recently digitized its copy of the book. You can see the whole text here.

In more than 30 illustrations, Stukeley’s book documents the way Stonehenge appeared when he visited it in the early 18thcentury. The historian was only the second scholarly investigator (after the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey) to take an interest in the site, and the first to publish a comprehensive account of what he found on his visits, including images of the way that the monument looked in context of the surrounding farmland.

(Continue Reading)

Illustration from The Naturalist’s Cabinet by Thomas Smith