Calling Tom Lehrer.

“There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium/And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium...”

So starts the 1959 song “Elements,” in which the mathematician and musical satirist set the periodic table to music. But now the old chestnut, beloved by science students for the last half century, needs more verses: Three newly discovered elements were given names on Friday by the General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics at a meeting in London.

They are Darmstadtium, or Ds, which has 110 protons in its nucleus and was named after the town in which it was discovered; Roentgenium, or Rg, with 111 protons, named after the discoverer of X-rays Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen; and Copernicium, or Cn, which has 112 protons and is named after the Polish astronomer Copernicus, who disrupted the view that the Earth was the center of the universe.

None of these elements occur in nature, or even last very long once created. They were all made in Darmstadt, Germany, at the Society for Heavy Ion Research Laboratory (Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung) by bombarding heavy nuclei with beams of other atoms. DENNIS OVERBYE