Howdy short waivers, we are wrapping up Black History Month by oncoring some of our favorite

episodes with Black Scientists this week.

Today, Kymna's Clarice Phelps helps discover a new element.

So please raise your glass and let us toast one of the newest members of the Periodic Table.

Enjoy.

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 Kymna's.

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.

I think uranium and plutonium, but also things like curium, minestiniam, 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

bang 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.

...