Thread:Qwertyxp2000 the second/@comment-29527649-20161205191512/@comment-24577221-20161206215519

Qwertyxp2000 the second wrote: How is superactinide science got to do with Festival of Yay? "On the subject of naming elements..."

Abedshark10 wrote: Wow. How often is it that new elements are discovered?

There's a nice table here showing the discovery dates. The most recent 10 discovered were from 1984 onward, so averaging about 1 per 3.2 years. As you can see, there's a big gap between the initial discovery and the official naming for the more recent ones. It takes a while to confirm discoveries based on extremely rare events in noisy data, and longer for people to come to some consensus about who/where/what gets to be honoured with an element name. The history of scientific discovery makes for some interesting reading -- often fascinating, and sometimes depressing when you see Important Researchers doing the same kinds of petty bickering as anyone else.