There's more to research on heavy elements than simply producing them. Recent experiments continue to explore their properties. In a welcome collaborative effort, researchers from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced at the Actinides ‘93 Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in September that they had produced an isotope of element 106 that emits an alpha particle with a particularly low energy within a decay time between 10 and 30 sec. That's long compared with the lifetimes of microseconds to milliseconds that are more typical of the elements at the upper end of the periodic table.