Such is the lot of the modern-day chemist: you wait ages for a new element to turn up and then four come along at once. Discovered by researchers in Japan, Russia and the US, the four new elements are the first to be added to the periodic table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were included. The new elements, all spectacularly short-lived and highly radioactive, complete the periodic table’s seventh row and render science textbooks around the world out of date. The US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the global organization that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement, verified the elements on 30 December, 2015 after poring over studies dating back to 2004. The scientists who found them must now come up with formal names to replace the clunky Latin- based placeholders – ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium – which reflect their atomic numbers, 113, 115, 117, and 118. The atomic number is the number of protons found in an element’s atomic nucleus. IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118. The body awarded credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the