https://www.sciencenews.org/article/...periodic-table
Certification of the discovery of elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 has been made, "On December 30, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced that a Russian-U.S. collaboration had attained sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118. IUPAC awarded credit for the discovery of element 113 to scientists at RIKEN in Wako, Japan (SN Online: 9/27/12). Both groups synthesized the elements by slamming lighter nuclei into each other and tracking the decay of the radioactive superheavy elements that followed."
The only thing that I don't like about this discovery is that it is made by making a trainwreck of other atoms crashing head-on into each other. Usually, the end products of such collisions are very short lived and not the kinds of atoms you would find in the daughter products in a Supernova. Can we be sure that these results are legitimate, or are they only the same kinds of short-lived, chance isotopes that one finds as odd-balls in a synchrotron?