http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26096/?p1=Blogs
Element 111, aka roentgenium (Rg) has supposedly been found in gold as a *natural element* - and it is stable ! As one commentator on Slashdot quipped The real question: What did Neal Stephenson know and when did he know it? or can we be sure if Rg is white or not ?but that one is an inside joke. Seriously, this could have has profound implications, if it is confirmed the implications would be either alone, or especially if discovery happens with the next lower element 110 - and one of those implications could be for excess energy in LENR. 111 was NOT supposed to be stable. And I was certainly not supposed to be found in nature in a measurable quantity. The way it was found could indicate the way that 111 might be found. Or else 110 could show up in Pd or Ni (gold is sometimes uses as an electrode in LENR). In fact one of the reasons it has not been found is that few instruments would be calibrated to even look for it. If this sounds a little too much like so-called monatomic or white gold so be it. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. However, 99 out of 100 stories about white gold are pure scam pseudoscience, and that is generous. So be careful there. Anyway the island of stability of heavy atoms might contain an isomer of a heavy element which is stable - and is found in Pd in PPM quantities, and is fissile in a lower energy regime. Most of us are interested in Column 10 in the periodic table, since all of the elements there: nickel palladium and platinum - are proton conductors which are active with hydrogen in a nuclear way, and have been used in LENR experiments. They form weak hydrides, which is most important for the property of weakness and the so-called virtual neutron. This new element in column 10 has been assigned the name Darmstadtium (Ds), named for the city in Southern Germany that is home to Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung which is where it was made artificially. 281Ds 0,000,011 ! has a half-life of just 11 seconds when made artificially but there is the possibility that like element 111, Ds could be a natural element, and if it is found in nature, it would be most likely be with others in column 10. This is especially true if the mine site is an ancient asteroid impact site like the Sudbury site in Canada. If either 110 or 111 were found in palladium naturally, in ppm quantities, where it is normally overlooked (white, so to speak) or else the instrument is not calibrated to look for it, then either of these could be responsible for some or all of the excess energy seen in some versions of LENR. Of course 110/111 could be found in Ni as well. The type of fission reaction could be unique. But the expected fission fragments would be exactly some of the same transmutation products already seen: Cs, Ba, Tl, Pb etc. Ed Storms has a list of about 100 experiments where transmutation is found. Most of them are suspected to be fusion related via additions of deuterium. That suspected route, however, is influenced by the fact that no one has even thought about LENR as a lower energy fission reaction of a superheavy natural element AFAIK. You heard it first on Vortex Lenrium has weird ring to it. Ponsium instead ? Jones
