December 1, 2016. On this day, a press conference took place in a Fukuoka city hotel that deserves to go down in the history of science in Japan. The day before, at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (known as RIKEN) in Wako, Saitama Prefecture, the acceptance of an official name for a new chemical element artificially created in Japan was announced. Its name was nihonium, its symbol Nh, and its atomic number 113. The periodic table is an organizational system for the elements, and is to science what the alphabet is to the English language. But until recently, the elements that fill the table were all officially discovered in the countries of Europe and North America, and none in Japan. In fact, in 1908 a Japanese had discovered the forty-third element and proposed the name nipponium for it. The fourth president of ... ... [Read more]