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Writer's pictureNihal Gulati

What the heck is Nihonium anyway?



Nihonium. Kind of an odd name for a website, no? Sounds like a made up word.


Well, it's not. Nihonium happens to be an element of the periodic table, number 113, meaning it has 113 protons in its nucleus.


Well, what is nihonium used for then?


Not much, seeing as it barely qualifies as existing.


The most stable isotope (form) of nihonium, nihonium-286, has a half-life of about 10 seconds. That means that if you were holding a block of nihonium, after just 10 seconds, half of your nihonium is no longer there, having decayed into other elements. Then after twenty seconds, another half of your remaining nihonium has decayed, leaving you with 1/4th nihonium. Then another 10 seconds and half of your remaining nihonium has decayed again, leaving you with 1/8th what you had originally. And so on. You get the pattern.

You also get acute radiation poisoning from the hogwash of nasty radiation emitted by all these decaying elements.


As you can imagine, it would be hard to find a use for such an element. Actually, we don't even know if it would form a block like in the example outlined above. Only a small amount of nihonium has been synthesized, and by small, I mean a couple grams maximum.


Yeah, it's completely synthesized. Kind of a strange to add it as a new element. There's something a bit cheap about continuing to make more and more unstable elements that last for mere milliseconds, then observing them and calling it discovering a new element.


But whatever. Let scientists have their glory. They deserve it.


Anyway, back to my strange naming choices.


Frankly, I chose the Nihonium Files simply because it sounds cool. I mean, you clicked on the website, didn't you? So it at least partially worked.


There's also the small bonus of nihonium sounding sort of like my name, Nihal. Nihal...Nihon... similar enough.


Almost like having an element named after me!


Ok, on a different note, this is to be the inaugural post of this new website.


If, by some miracle, you are an actual stranger reading this post somewhere on the web, then my goal for this website is to post weekly, just talking about whatever random stuff I feel like ranting about.


Maybe you'll learn something from it all.


Or maybe not. Hope you enjoy!


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