Yes, a new entry for the Periodic Table of the Elements.

From today's Las Vegas Review-Journal:

"Here's how scientists create an element: They get a tiny portion of one thing -- in this case, calcium -- and send it through a particle accelerator, also called a cyclotron. A cyclotron is a huge circular tube, pretty much. They can be the size of a building, like the one in Russia, or the size of a whole neighborhood, like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva that's been getting so much media attention because scientists say they might be able to create a tiny black hole.

The scientists put whatever thing they're using into the cyclotron and get it going fast. Then they slam it into another thing -- in this case, berkelium.

Then, they see what happens by studying the data recorded by a computer. If the two things fuse together into an entirely new thing, voila. They've created something unique.

The periodic table currently has elements numbered 1 through 118 -- 117 had been missing until this experiment was a success. An element's number indicates how many protons the element has. Hydrogen, No. 1, has one proton; helium, No. 2, has two protons; and so on.

The highest number to occur in nature is 92, uranium. Every element beyond that was created by people. Plutonium, number 94, is one example. These are called superheavy elements.

The point? Scientists theorize that this stuff existed at some time in the past, maybe way back at the creation of the universe. It's just cool to know that it can, in reality, exist. It probably means their theories are correct.

And what's more, the scientists don't know what the stuff might be capable of. Could they be creating some sort of miracle substance? Probably not. But who knows? You can't know until you take a peek, see what the stuff can do.

That is where the problem arises. Usually, newly created elements exist for only a tiny bit of time, maybe a few seconds. You usually don't get very much.

In the case of element 117, they created only one atom at a time, six times. And those six atoms disappeared before there was much of a chance to study them.

But it's a start, anyway."

Sidebar:

"ELEMENT 117

The element created by Russian and U.S. scientists does not yet have a name. It is temporarily being called ununseptium, a Latin play on the atomic number 117. Giving it a formal name could take years.

The Russian facility where element 117 was created also claims elements 113, 114, 115, 116 and 118.

The creation of element 117 involved scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UNLV."