New additions to the periodic table are artificial elements forged in laboratories that are so unstable they exist for just fractions of a second. Officially naming them, however, can take years. The names for elements 110, 111 and 112 - darmstadtium, roentgenium and copernicium, respectively - had already been approved by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). You may even own a periodic table containing these names. It wasn’t until Friday, however, that physicists attending the annual meeting of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) in London rubber-stamped these choices and the accompanying symbols: Ds, Rg and Cn. This completes the final stage of the official element naming process - for now.
