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April 7th is World Health Day. World Health Day is sponsored by the World Health Organization to promote awareness of a specific theme of concern for WHO. The 2010 theme is '1000 Cities, 1000 Lives'. They are collecting 1000 stories of people contributing to health awareness and profiling 1000 cities around the world that promote health or cleanup campaigns. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.   1823 - Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles died.   Charles was a French physicist and inventor who described the relationship between the volume and absolute temperatures of ideal gases known as Charles's Law. He also built the first hydrogen filled balloon and the first manned hydrogen filled balloon. 1817 - Francesco Selmi was born. Selmi was an Italian chemist who was a pioneer in colloid chemistry. He also coined the term 'ptomaine poisonoing' while studying putrification and poisons.

When you go looking for new elements, you already know how many protons they are going to have. It's a matter of finding the new element, making it, or detecting decay products that could only have come from the new element. This is a tricky process because the higher atomic weight elements are difficult to produce and very, very short-lived. It's rare for new elements to be discovered, so I'm excited that a team of Russian and American scientists report that they have created 6 atoms of element 117. Atoms of the new element were produced by firing atoms of calcium (atomic number 20) at a berkelium target (atomic number 97) to produce atoms with 117 protons. At this time, no 'real' name for element 117 has been proposed, so you can call it element 117 or by its placeholder name, ununseptium (which means 117). Names are proposed for elements only after their existence has been confirmed by a second source. The New York Times has more details about the discovery or...