New elements
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does it take to make something which has never existed on Earth before? The search for element 120 on the periodic table has begun at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Cosmologist Andrew Pontzen, who is used to studying the processes of creation, visits the 88-inch Cyclotron facility at Berkeley, where the next new element may be created very soon. To uncover what motivates scientists to pursue something that is possibly only produced in the violent explosions of stars he speaks with the scientists trying it now, the scientists who last made an element at Berkeley 50 years ago, and a historian of the fraught history of element discovery. The answer is not as straight forward as he suspected.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | We're going to go through the main doors into the cyclotron facility. |
| 0:12.6 | It's like a kind of giant cavern with a giant box in the middle of the cavern. |
| 0:18.5 | Yeah, so we're actually standing directly outside of the main cyclotron vaults. |
| 0:22.4 | Separating us from the cyclotron is about 10 feet of concrete right now. |
| 0:25.8 | Is that a safety thing? |
| 0:27.0 | Yes. The radiation fields that the cyclotron generates when it is running are quite high. |
| 0:33.5 | For the BBC World Service, this is the documentary. |
| 0:38.2 | I'm on the hillside above Berkeley, California. |
| 0:41.4 | And while it feels like I've entered an end-of-the-world bunker, |
| 0:44.9 | I'm not here to witness destruction. |
| 0:47.5 | I'm here to understand creation. |
| 0:51.1 | My name is Jennifer Pore, and I'm a research scientist |
| 0:53.6 | working in the Heavy Element Program at Berkeley Lab. My name is Jacqueline Gates. I am'm a research scientist working in the heavy element program at Berkeley L. |
| 0:56.1 | My name is Jacqueline Gates. I am the group leader of the heavy element group. |
| 0:59.3 | We study super heavy elements. A super heavy element is any element with 104 protons or more. |
| 1:05.7 | Back in the 40s, when we were beginning to understand nuclear science, we didn't think that these elements could exist. |
| 1:12.1 | Now, these researchers have worked out how to make another one, |
| 1:15.8 | how to manufacture an entirely new super-heavy element |
| 1:19.2 | that has never before existed on planet Earth. |
| 1:23.2 | We have to make these in collisions |
| 1:24.8 | where we combine nuclei of two lighter atoms together. |
... |
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