ont face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Narrator: This is Science Today. The recent discovery of two new superheavy elements to add to chemistry’s Periodic Table was a collaborative effort between Russian and American scientists. Joshua Patin of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory served as a primary data analyst and says in essence, time was on their side. Using an accelerator in Russia, they were able to run the experiment for a month – here in the States, reserving accelerator time is much more limited.

Patin: It’s more of a cultural thing in the sense that our leader of the collaboration in Russia is an academician – he has scientific control over the experiments that are performed at that cyclotron, so therefore if he wants to run an experiment, he can pretty much say, let’s run the experiment. We had to run a month to see four atoms, so you’re thinking one atom per week if you’re successful and statistically, you’re dealing with a very small number of occurrences and events actually happening and so you could run for maybe two weeks and not see something.

Narrator: For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.