Officials in New York are to launch a gas attack on as many as 2,000 Canadian geese in an attempt to prevent a repetition of the incident in January when a plane ditched in the Hudson river.

The hunt, begins some time in the next week to coincide with the time of year that the geese molt and thus stop flying as frequently. Though officials have attempted to cull geese before from airport property, this is the first time they’ve extended that attack to 40 other city-owned and controlled properties such as public parks and water treatment facilities in a five mile radius. Smart geese would be best advised to get hold of a municipal map pronto.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg described the near-disaster of flight 1549, which lost all thrust after a collision with a flock of geese shortly after takeoff, as a “catalyst” to tackling the threat of birds to airline safety.

The project will later be extended to putting up additional signs warning the public not to feed (and thus encourage) geese, and to filling in a large hole on Rikers Island which attracts the birds in large numbers. There will also be a trial of a bird-specific radar system at JFK and the city will hire a second marine biologist to help further control the bird population around airports.

The birds will be captured and then killed at an off-site facility using CO2 gas, a method approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association to avoid unnecessary cruelty. Unlike some previous culls, all the bird will be destroyed rather than donated to food banks.

Of course, locating and killing avian pests in a major metropolis housing the Empire State Building is hardly something new to many Geeks Are Sexy readers:

[Picture Source: Flickr (CC)]

Officials have agreed to add a new element to the periodic table. But they won’t do so until the team which discovered it comes up with a permanent name.

The element will become the 112th to appear on the table (in the gap below mercury), as determined by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). It’s made from a fusion of zinc and lead. Although the first atom was created in 1996, it took several attempts to produce enough evidence to earn IUPAC approval last month.

The process of creating the element, which involves using a particle accelerator to fire charged zinc atoms at lead atoms, is extremely difficult and only four atoms have ever been created.

The new element currently has the temporary name ununbium, adapted from the Latin for 112. However, IUPAC is asking for a permanent name to be chosen by Professor Sigurd Hoffman of the Centre for Ion Research in Germany, which discovered the element. The centre was also responsible for discovering the previous four elements which now reside in the period table.

The element is one of a group categorized as transuranium, also known as superheavy. These are elements with more protons than the 92 found in uranium, and are characterized by being radioactive and rapidly decaying into other elements. The best known is probably plutonium.

The superheavy elements are split into two sub-categories. The new element, as with all with atomic number above 103, fits into the transactinide group. These are ones which have never been found occurring naturally and have instead been created in labs. Because the decay starts just milliseconds after creation, scientists don’t yet have a way of creating atoms which can serve any practical purpose.

Elements with atomic numbers of 113 to 116, as well as 118, have already been confirmed to exist, but have not yet been demonstrated to the satisfaction of IUPAC.

So what do GeeksAreSexy readers suggest for naming the new element? I’m proposing emergencium, in recognition of 112 being the number for calling for emergency services in both many domestic landline networks and on three billion cellphones worldwide.

[Picture source: Flickr (CC)]