How to fill a gap in scientific knowledge

How to fill a gap in scientific knowledge

 “It’s isolating,” said Phelps, who after also served as an engineering laboratory technician aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. “You feel like you have to represent your entire race and descend the racial stereotypes … especially in nuclear and radiochemistry.”

For years, there had been a single square in the seventh row of the periodic table of elements that scientists struggled to fill.

 No element with the precise chemical and physical properties to fit that spot in the familiar chart ever had been found or synthesized.