Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the RIKEN Institute in Japan. The decision means Japan becomes the first Asian country to name an element. Under IUPAC rules, new elements can be named after mythological concepts, minerals, a place or country, or a scientist. When elements 114 and 116 were assigned formal names in 2012, scientists chose flerovium and livermorium respectively, after the Flerov Lab at Dubna’s Joint Institute of Research and the Lawrence Livermore Lab in the US, where the elements were discovered. Kosuke Morita, who led the research at RIKEN, said his team now planned to “look to the uncharted territory of element 119 and beyond.” Jan Reedijk, president of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC, said: “The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row.” The Japanese team is believed to be considering three names for ununtrium: japonium, rikenium and nishinarium, after the Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, where the element was found. “They will have been thinking about it for a while already,” said Polly Arnold, professor of chemistry at Edinburgh University. “This is painstaking work. All this trying to understand Mother Nature helps us with our models and with understanding radioactive decay. If we understand it better, hopefully we can do better