special to C EN Felicity Nelson
The periodic table looks complete, but it isn’t. The race is on to discover the table’s next row of elements, starting with elements 119 and 120. Japan hopes to produce element 119 one atom at a time using its powerful, custom-built facility at the Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science. Geopolitics and shifting national priorities have caused competitors—a German institute and a collaboration between the US and Russia—to fall behind, leaving Japan’s path to victory seemingly wide open . Meanwhile, despite the breakdown of the US-Russia collaboration, the search for element 120 continues at the US’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where proof-of-concept experiments are underway. At the start of the new year, nuclear chemists Hiromitsu Haba and Kouji Morimoto slide precisely 119 Japanese yen into the collection box at their local shrine. They are seeking good fortune in their hunt for an elusive entity: element 119. Haba and Morimoto are