Monikers Coined for No-Name Elements

Elements 110, 111, and 112 on the periodic table are officially named.

Written byJef Akst

| 1 min read

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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, SCIENCEDISCOVERER

Welcome darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn), formerly known as Elements 110, 111 and 112, respectively. The names were suggested by the Joint Working Party on the Discovery of Elements, and approved last Friday (November 4) by the General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), according to the Institute of Physics (IOP) in London.

Thethree elements are synthetic substances first manufactured in the 1990s, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Darmstadtium was named after the city near where it was discovery, Darmstadt, Germany. The names roentgenium and copernicium were chosen to honor famed scientists of eras past—German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895 and took home the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his ...

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Meet the Author

Jef Akst
Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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