Bolivia is primarily known for two things: being the poorest country in South America, and having a president with a terrible haircut. However, it might soon be known for a third thing: lithium. Turns out Bolivia has the world's largest reserves of the light metal, and according to Foreign Policy, that positions Bolivia as the Saudi Arabia of our carbon-less, battery-powered future.

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More than 10 years after Russian scientists first claimed to create atoms of Ununquadium, the unstable element in position 114 on the periodic table, scientists at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory have confirmed their own element 114 sample. Unfortunately, the 114 atoms quickly decayed, dashing years of hope that element 114 occupied the long sought "island of stability" where super-heavy elements could exist in large quantities for long periods of time.

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So it turns all those hybrid car owners who turn their environmentally conscious noses up have an unexpected caveat to their green-ness--their cars are sucking up rare earth metals at a disturbing rate.

Rare earth elements take up 17 slots on the periodic table, and are named not for their overall scarcity (they're actually quite common in trace elements throughout the Earth's core) but for the relatively uncommon minerals in which they were originally found; few rare earth elements exist in pure elemental form naturally.

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When we talked with element 112's discoverer, Sigurd Hofmann, on the significance of making a permanent mark on the periodic table, he told us he wanted a moniker that recognized a famous scientist while avoiding the flag-waving nationalism normally associated with the process. Today, Hofmann and his team made their decision public.

Good bye element 112 and ununbium, its placeholder name. Hello "Copernicium."

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Ah, the periodic table. The Rosetta Stone of chemistry, if you will. Well, today, this great tormentor of high school science students celebrates its 140th birthday, so lets take a quick look at a bit of the history behind this scientific gem.

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Each month, Popular Science features one of Theodore Gray's DIY (if dangerous) experiments. See the whole list here.

2006

January

Making a Perfect Match

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