While idly browsing on YouTube, I found this great video by a professor at Nottingham University. He discusses the recent creation of Element 114, which has since been called Ununquadium, by accelerating and fusing Calcium with Plutonium. The existence of the atom has been indirectly observed 80 times now through inspecting the evidence of its decay. All this you can find in the usual places on the web.

I was very pleased to find that youtube isn’t just used by illiterate people abusing each other in the comments section of various pop videos, but also by academics, researchers and anyone else with a curiosity of the world around them. This particular man seems to be a legend in the making with his obsession with ties, academic one-up-manship and of course his hair. It’s funny that so many university lecturers choose to sport the crazy-scientist hair do, elevating their status in the academic society, while it was born of men who had better things to be doing with their time than fussing over their appearance.

Going back to the discovery of the new element, I was slightly alarmed to find that after eight days of continuous acceleration and impacts, the establishment found evidence of just two Ununquadium atoms. Either way, a remarkable achievement that of course will leave the Americans, Japanese and Europeans trying to find the next semi-stable element in the universe.

YouTube can be amazingly fruitful sometimes. I find it hard to convince the likes of my parents that it’s a resource worth visiting at least occasionally, as it is too well associated with cheap jokes and popular junk. Nonetheless, it has a significant quantity of educational videos, high quality entertainment and interesting video blogs from reputable sources, such as our man here.

Now, back to x-factor.