Oxygen nucleus with twice as many neutrons shown to be stable

24O has a half life of 65ms, so "24O isn't especially stable. If you look at that table, 23O has a half life of 82 ms, 22O is 2.25 s, and the isotopes gradually get more stable as you approach the stable 16-17-18 isotopes. If it were more stable than 23O, I would agree that it would be surprising, but that's not the case. In fact, if you look at what they did and read the abstract for the actual paper, the claimed novelty here isn't creating 24O (as others have done so before) or about how stable it is, but rather that they came up with a new technique to characterize it. The article's title is misleading." Said chaos386 on reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/14hz9v/oxygen_nucle...

The title is 100% wrong. (Oxygen nucleus with twice as many neutrons shown to be stable)

O24 has a half life of 65ms. It is not stable.

There is a reason HN frowns on editing the original title. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes, like here, you get it totally wrong.

The article title is: "Oxygen nucleus with twice as many neutrons as normal is shown to be surprisingly stable"

And even that title is very confusing. As best as I can tell, the actual research is that they measured the shape of O24 and found it to be round.

I don't see anything at all the shows it to be "surprisingly stable".

How long will it be before we can quickly test these things in a computer simulation?