'Should we make something up'

Professor Martyn Poliakoff often says Hassium is his favourite film on The Periodic Table of Videos.

Not because it is full of interesting information... Quite the opposite.

In fact The Professor knew nothing about Hassium, famously asking (with tongue in cheek): "Should we make something up?"

However The Professor recovered... And managed to fudge a minute about the elusive element 108 by discussing the predictive powers of the periodic table.

The original video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ8cZoA0tiU.

However Professor Poliakoff finally learned something about Hassium when we visited GSI at Darmstadt, Germany in early 2010.

This is the facility where the first atoms of Hassium were created, forged in a giant particle collider.

With footage captured during this visit, I've finally been able to update our Hassium video with some new information (see below).

But as you'll see, I couldn't resist keeping the introduction from the original film.