You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Today on Shortwave, we are setting you a place at our very favorite table, the periodic table,

because it's not just for chemists.

Everything in the world is made up of the things that are on the periodic table.

That's Clarice Phelps, a nuclear chemist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

What I specialize in are the bottom two rows that nobody else really pays attention to.

And those are special to us because they're really heavy elements.

Think Uranium and Platonium, but also things like Curium, Mindstinium and Californium.

These heavy elements, the ones with lots of protons and neutrons,

they can give us insights into the beginning of our universe among many other things.

They are radioactive and they decay into other elements that we are able to use for

industry, for medical uses, for the military, and for discovering what happened when the big

bank happened and things that happened in the stars.

But many of these elements don't exist naturally.

They've been created by scientists.

The process can take years and span the globe.

And who knows how many elements we can create.

Each one is a new experiment, a new discovery.

And Clarice was involved in one of the most recent.

I was a part of a team at Oak Ridge National Lab to discover super heavy element labeled 117.

Today on the show, Clarice tells us how her path went from working on a nuclear

aircraft carrier to being part of something big she never expected,

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