Scientists Discover Two ‘Alien’ Minerals in Meteorite | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Discover Two ‘Alien’ Minerals in Meteorite

forbes.com

30 pointspseudolus14 comments

This article seems to be almost a complete copy of the article it references, by another author (https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2022/11/new-minerals-discovere...)

Is that the kind of journalism to expect from Forbes and such institutions? Are newspapers just full of reposts?

That does truly look like a better link than the Forbes one. The Forbes one also omits some interesting information in the U Alberta release

As far as I know Forbes is just blogspam-as-a-franchise.

I think like other publications (e.g. businessinsider) you have the blog side (note the /sites in the url) a bit like Medium. And you have the news editorial, which is the main site.

  The first receives its name from the meteorite itself, dubbed the "El Ali" meteorite because it was found lying on the ground of a valley used as a pasture for camels near the town of El Ali, in the Hiiraan region of Somalia.

Slightly acceptable, I suppose.

  Herd named the second mineral after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, vice president of the ASU Interplanetary Initiative, professor at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Bah. It should maybe then be called something like ASUIIte or ASUSESEite.

But much better in both cases would be a name that hinted at it's constituents and structure.

Let's at least stop naming scientific/mathematical objects after people.

Sorry for what is most certainly a naive question from someone who hasn't studied much chemistry or physics. This line stood out to me.

> Locock’s rapid identification was possible because the two minerals had been synthetically created before, so he was able to match the composition of the newly discovered natural minerals with their human-made counterparts.

Isn't it possible, in theory, to synthesize an infinite variety of chemical elements which would just get heavier and heavier as we append them to the periodic table, or is there some kind of a natural limit?

The very heavy atoms that we can create usually have incredibly short half-lives and decay in a tiny fraction of a second.

Isn’t there an active research for the “island of stability” at the top end of the table? Aka a set of elements that theoretically remain stable.

Yes! Here is a nice PBS Spacetime video on the subject that was recently published.

"Are there Undiscovered Elements Beyond The Periodic Table?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prvXCuEA1lw

That was a good watch! Thanks.

In terms of elements, yes there are some fundamental limits. The limit (as I was taught in undergrad physics) we practically estimated by finding the heaviest element where an electron does not breach the speed of light.

Fun fact : gold has its distinctive color due to quantum mechanics and the electron's speed around the nucleus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemist...

Mineral != element.

It sounds like you may be confusing "mineral" and "chemical element". Minerals are regular arrangements of compounds of elements. It is enormously easier to get progressively heavier (or extreme in any other sense) synthetic minerals than to synthesize new elements. Synthesizing new minerals require arranging existing common elements in new ways; synthesizing new elements requires extreme high-energy physics.

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