Three New Elements Named

Unfortunately, no indestructible metal has been found … yet. Three new elements were added to the periodic table Friday, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry in London was tasked with naming them. There’s darmstadtium, named after the German city where element No. 110 was first synthesized in 1994, with the symbol Ds. There’s roentgenium (symbol Rg, No. 111) in honor of the physicist Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen, who first discovered X-rays. Then there’s copernicium, an extremely radioactive synthetic material created in 1996—also in Darmstadt—and named after an astronomer whose heliocentric ideas were just as powerful as radiation.