The Changing Periodic Table

(colours are off in this post and i don't know why- technical malfunction!)

When using Google today to search for a belated present for my dad, I saw the Google icon was a periodic table, with Dmitri Mendeleev holding a cube marked S 32, as it is his 182nd birthday. As I have a keen interest in chemistry and the father of chemistry, if ever there was one, was Mendeleev, I decided to learn about him and his table and thought would share some of what I found.

At the time, chemistry was a much more mysterious subject, with around 60 elements known, but not put into a specific order other than by their atomic weights. Mendeleev and other scientists noticed that although they were ordered by weight, the similar chemical properties of the elements were not at all ordered; for example lithium, sodium, and potassium were all reactive with water to similar degrees and in similar ways, but were separated by about 7 or 17 places, or that similar compounds were formed when Flourine, Chlorine, Bromine and Iodine were used, but again were too far apart to show that they were linked when put into order of atomic weight.

Monument in St.Petersburg to Mendeleev depicting
the periodic table

Mendeleev worked tirelessly to attempt to find a pattern, or a way of organising the elements that showed clear trends, even writing out the names numbers and characteristics on small cards and arranging them in different ways until he came to the conclusion that he was missing cards. Not too dissimilar from that feeling of annoyance when you don't have all the pieces to the puzzle you're trying to complete, Mendeleev left gaps in his arrangement and predicted the properties the elements yet to be discovered. He was so certain of himself that he even published a paper arguing with the observations of french chemist Paul Francoise Lecoq about an element Lecoq had discovered called Gallium in 1875... and he was correct having never seen nor worked with the element.

The periodic table is one of science's crowning achievements, a catalogue of the universe's atomic building blocks. 
(NOTE: I do not know why, but the text will not conform to the usual blue colour in the next few paragraphs)
Some of my favourite elements include:

Caesium- beautiful but dangerous

Caesium, from the latin caesius, meaning ,right blue, because of the coloured compounds it forms. It is a beautiful light champagne/gold colour at room temperature but is also extremely explosive in water and many other solutions due to its ability to give away an electron, forming Caesium hydroxide, a strong baseIt's also even the definition of the second in atomic clocks which measure how many billions of billions of times it vibrates.

Carbon because of its versatility in life, from capsaicin to benzene, from morphine to chlorophyll they are all dependant on carbon and the whole subject devoted to it, organic chemistry, is fascinating just because of the apparent similarity of molecules which can then actually be entirely different from each other.

Mercury and Gallium, the only two liquid metal elements at room temperature (or just above) both are fascinating to play with, even if most of their chemistry is more limited than some other elements. One of the most poisonous and dangerous compounds ever found, dimethylmercury, an organometallic, is pretty scary, though. (only 0.01ml can be absorbed though the skin and kill in weeks)

Gallium- fun to play with

Of course there are new advancements being made with the periodic table all the time, especially with discovering the new elements like Uub, Uut, Uuq etc. just a few weeks ago elements 115 and 113 were confirmed in Japan and Moscow simultaneously using massive particle accelerators, firing atoms of calcium and americium (40+95) to make Uup or Ununpentium (Un-1-un-1-pent-5-ium). Unfortunately very  few atoms might be synthesised this way and all isotopes decay into helium nuclei (alpha radiation)in between 16 and 220 milliseconds, but have faith: an 'island of stability' has been predicted in which we might be able to create atoms which don't decay so fast that we might actually be able to do some real chemistry with!

Darker block corresponds to longer stable isotopes, as you can see at around 122 there may be some stable isotopes

My speculation:

The remnants of Ubu or Ubb?

This possible atom would probably be a new member of the alkali earth metals or the alkali metals, so I predict somewhere in the near future there might be something new to throw in water or make some strong hydroxide with! (although this is highly unlikely due to tiny tiny amounts made in particle accelerators. It will probably have the symbol Ubu 121 or Ubb 122 (Unbiunium and Unbibinium respectively) Ubu will probably have the largest radius of any atom. I wonder if any of these elements have been created before in supernova explosions, but are just so short lived that we would never detect them of course. I suppose we will see in time if I am right or totally wrong writing this now..