In a comment on the post below, I referred to “Cp” as the chemical symbol of the element #112. It was by reading reports like this one and this one that I got this idea. It turns out that the symbol is actually “Cn.” By way of correction, here’s a YouTube from “The Periodic Table of Videos” about the name “Copernicium.”
And their earlier post about the element and its name:
acilius
believer1
lefalcon
losthunderlads
vthunderlad
Panther Red 
cymast
/ December 11, 2009Funny how we unknowingly focused on the element with the controversy.
“Hassium. I know nothing about Hassium. Should we make something up?” Funny!
Love the hair!
cymast
/ December 11, 2009So that’s where your shirt went!
acilius
/ December 11, 2009I still have the one that looks like that. The one I had previously I don’t think you would have seen. I had it in college. I wore it when I went mountain climbing, and by the end of that trip it not only bore the symbols of all the elements then known to science, but samples of most of them. By the time I got it clean, it was in tatters.
acilius
/ December 11, 2009The Periodic Table of Videos is great. The Professor is funny even when he does know things, which is virtually all the time.
cymast
/ December 11, 2009Turns out there’s a lot of detailed stuff available on the synthetic element Hassium (element 108, a transition metal). So far, 100 Hassium atoms have been synthesized. They have a half-life of ~10 seconds. Hassium was historically known as “Eka-osmium,” being that it was placed under Osium (element 76, a transition metal) on the periodic table. In the early 20th century, the name “Eka-osmium” referred to Plutonium (element 94, an actinoid). An actinoid (or actinide) includes the elements starting with Actinium and ending with Lawrencium.
acilius
/ December 11, 2009Gee, ~10 seconds- that sounds like a really long lifespan for a synthetic element. I’m surprised he didn’t have that tidbit on the tip of his tongue as soon as the topic came up.
cymast
/ December 11, 2009Yeah, that sounded long to me too. But if “s” stands for “seconds,” (and I think it does because I looked up the abbreviation on a scientific abbreviations chart) then wiki says “~10 seconds.”
Maybe our scientist was baffled by and skeptical of Hassium’s half-life length and so decided to skip the dubious element altogether.
cymast
/ December 11, 2009Clarification: A specific isotope of Hassium has a half-life of ~10 seconds.
Another specific isotope of Hasssium has a half-life of ~16.5 minutes.
The plot lengthens!
acilius
/ December 12, 2009Sixteen and a half minutes, wow. That sounds like the “island of stability” that they keep speculating about when they make new superheavy elements.