The Periodic Table Has Been Made A Bit More Tidy, Seventh Row Completed -- January 4, 2015

I will have to get a new coffee cup, but I will wait until the "new" elements are named, Sheldon accepts the new names, and the new names are on the new cup:

The periodic table is complete! The last four elements have been added. I honestly did now know if I would see this in my lifetime. This is quite a milestone. The [London] Guardian is reporting:

Four new elements have been added to the periodic table, finally completing the table’s seventh row and rendering science textbooks around the world instantly out of date.

The elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.

The four were verified on 30 December by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the global organisation that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement.

IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118.

The body awarded credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the Riken institute in Japan.

The elements, which currently bear placeholder names, will be officially named by the teams that discovered them in the coming months. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.

The [London] Guardian has more at this link:

At last, the periodic table looks tidy. To nobody’s surprise, the discovery – and indeed creation – of a few atoms of elements number 113, 115, 117 and 118 has now been verified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), and the seventh period is complete, giving the main table a nice, smooth bottom row. As soon as the new elements are officially named, the world’s chemistry textbooks can be reprinted with what may well be the final version. (There might be an eighth period out there too, but let’s not think about that for now.)

Since we first began to understand that each element consists of a specific number of protons surrounded by the same number of electrons (and flavoured with various numbers of neutrons), it has been easy to speculate about finding more. The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev first arranged them in the now familiar way in 1869, having seen the table in a dream. Henceforth, if anyone asks you what the universe is, you can give (as a short answer): “This.” So here are some of the most intriguing elements on the all-singing, all-dancing new periodic table.

The elements and current place-holder names that have been verified and will now be renamed:

• 113, Uut, ununtrium -- un-un-trium -- one-one-three
• 115, Uup, ununpentium -- un-un-pentium -- one-one-five
• 117, Uus, ununseptium -- un-un-septium -- one-one-seven
• 118,  Uuo, ununoctium -- un-un-octium -- one-one-eight

It's too bad; I finally understood / knew the "names" of these four elements. 

Element #118 is a no-brainer: "Octomomium" as in "octo-mom," the "mother" of all elements.