It’s still a maybe, and some day element 122 *will* be discovered, it just *might* not be naturally occurring/long-lived like the early reports claimed.

As for the properties… I’m not sure what they’d be. Elements have similar properties based on what energy level their outermost electrons occupy, with blocks on the periodic defined by those energy levels (s block, p block, d block, f block being the ones that all known elements fit into). 122 would be the first-discovered element of the *g* block, so, though physicists could probably tell you expected properties for that block, I don’t know what they are. A lot of the rarer f-block elements are used for specialized purposes in electronics (and, again, I don’t really know exactly what properties of those elements are so useful in electronics, but they’re needed in trace amounts to enable the technology we have)…… so, in other words, if 122 turns out to be real (or we find another element in the predicted “island of stability,” where very heavy/man-made elements start to become stable enough to work with), it could open up some new sort of device that had previously been impossible (and possibly unimagined). And that’s just awesome.

And a waterwheel generates more energy than the operator puts in, but it ultimately is using solar power (from evaporation of the water to move it uphill). That doesn’t count as free energy in the way Jeff meant… but you probably knew that :)

ANYHOO, basically… there’s plenty that’s still mysterious, but two guys in California pre-announcing a photo op aren’t the ones who are going to present it to you. I recommend starting somewhere like newscientist.com or science.slashdot.com. Both over-sensationalize things occasionally (and get things flat-out wrong from time to time), but at least it’s based in reality, which is way more mystery-filled than anyone’s imagination… and occasionally there’s even a payoff, when we find something new and totally awesome.

For example… did you know they might have found a new class of elements, past all the radioactive stuff and not all that radioactive, that might be naturally occurring? If confirmed, and we find a way to make them in larger quantities than the one-in-a-bazillion they are thought to exist at naturally, it could result in completely new materials, with properties that… well, that we have a pretty good idea about already, actually, thanks to physics and chemistry predictions, but probably some things we haven’t figured out yet.

Yes, I’m a skeptic jerk ruining everyone’s fun, but I wouldn’t hold my breath over this bigfoot reveal. Watch real science for the exciting stuff that we don’t understand yet, there’s tons of it all the time… and, even better, occasionally someone figures some of it out!