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Everything above 93 is man-made and ridiculously radioactive. The most famous is plutonium, but that's only 94 -- we've gone all the way up to 118, and it's way more unstable. Anyone about to start screaming about danger and weapons, congratulations! You've just proved you don't know what you're talking about! These new super-heavy elements are so radioactive that they're no threat at all, because they only exist for fractions of a second. In fact, the Flerov Laboratory where ununoctium is produced is the exact opposite of a bomb: lots of people clustered around putting huge quantities of energy into putting radioactive atoms together.

Image via LLNL

"Wait ... wait ... there's one!"

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After 33 hours of bombarding californium (98, already a man-made element) with calcium (20, accelerated by a U400 cyclotron, not good for your bones at this exact instant), a collaboration between the Russian Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory produced three atoms of ununoctium. Understand: A group of humans got together, built equipment and made things that don't exist.

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The universe doesn't make deep-fried chocolate bars either. We have to do all the cool stuff.

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Doubtless the depths of space smash a few super-heavy elements together somewhere, but in the midst of cosmic collisions so vast that they make finding a needle in a haystack look like finding a needle shoved into your eye. We did it in a building, on purpose, and the decay chains of this physical trinity taught us more about nucleon physics in a millisecond than humanity knew for hundreds of thousands of years.

We're learning more about existence by continuing where it left off.

Luke endures the opposite of science in The Cosmopolitan Experiment, and recovers with The Most Impossibly Awesome Action Movie of All Time. He also tumbles and replies to every single tweet.