LIVERMORE -- Three eighth-graders stood shoulder-to-shoulder in
a classroom at Andrew Christensen Middle School; their eyes
closed. Standing a few paces away, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory
nuclear physicist Mark Stoyer tossed handfuls of miniature
marshmallows, aiming for the students' open mouths. The
demonstration was just one way Stoyer and his wife Nancy Stoyer
-- part of a team that discovered the new element livermorium --
helped explain the process behind the element's creation. In
Friday's class, the marshmallows represented calcium ions; the
students were the curium targets the scientists bombarded. "What
you saw there is that science is messy and most of them missed
their targets," Stoyer told the students. "If this bag had 1,000
marshmallows in it, I'd have to throw 6 billion bags per second
for three months ... That's how hard it is to do." During their
presentation to the school's STEM II Exploration class, , the
Stoyers covered all aspects of the work performed by teams in
Livermore and Dubna, R