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Hassium has just become the heaviest element ever to have its chemistry
studied—and it follows the pattern of the periodic table. The artificial
element, first manufactured 17 years ago, has atomic number 108 and is made one
atom at a time by smashing together nuclei of lighter elements. “Together, we
have studied the chemistry of very, very few atoms,” says Heino Nitsche of the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a member of the
international team that studied hassium. “This is very fundamental chemistry
showing that the periodic table even applies for these heavy elements.”