Addition Reactions

Answer: BISMUTH AS USUAL

Explanation: Per the central entry of ELEMENTS, we have yet another periodic table meta, haha. Ten 4-letter entries, in two quasi-table-shaped sets, are composed of exactly two 2-letter elemental symbols: HELI for instance, is He and Li (NO other entry in the grid other than these ten gives us exactly two elemental symbols, so this did lead to some meh fill in places that it didn't need to be). Take the atomic numbers of these two symbols, add them together, and then find the symbol of the new atomic number you discover (so, for HELI: He (2) + Li (3) = 5, which is B). These new ten symbols in order: B I Sm U Th As U S U Al, which becomes BISMUTH AS USUAL, a fitting pun in honor of meta #83, bismuth's atomic number. Element-ary, my dear!

the math teacher is making us do math again! thanks mr. mikey

Ha ha!! I groaned with appreciation.

Pure 79

I loved this one! So damn clever. I was going to guess bismuth initially, because of the 83, but then went through all the steps anyway, and was glad I did. I honestly don't know how you do these. Thanks for the puzzle, Mikey!

ROFL!

Lol. So many ways to go with this one it took me a while to see the right mechanism. When BISMUTH started to appear I knew I had it. Clever construction!

Ha! My dad was a chemist, he might appreciate this "solution" :-)

I saw HELI and MONA and thought, no, no way he's going to do that! But yes, yes, he did!

Funny!

Bismuth? Who he? I have to get one of those giant pull-down periodic table charts we had in high school. Online tables use tiny type.

Love it!!!

My eyes and brain hurt. So happy I got this! It's great, obviously. Now back to my complete failure to see absolutely anything with Will's and Matt's metas!

Had some dumb transcribing errors that tripped me up for a while. I had “as usual” for the bottom, but wrong things for CAMO… almost submitted BUSINESS AS USUAL but a little more “check your work” got me to the pun. (Also, for a while was using ITAS for 53+73+16 (three elements)… but dropped that when IPAD wouldn’t work out.). This was fun! You can thank the universe that I am not your pharmacist/chemist, as I am much fonder of free-form creativity than scientific precision! (Though in my job— architectural design— I have to do both ends of the spectrum!)

OMG Mikey that is mind-blowing! My favorite element - the element of surprise! It took me forever to get around to the idea of adding those numbers together. Then I thought - well, it can't be squares in the grid, some of the numbers are too big. He couldn't POSSIBLY.... but he DID!!

I thought of the mechanism as soon as I saw the themers but discarded it out of laziness. All those numbers. Then I remembered that MikeyG's relation to numbers is different from mine. So I did the math, and when I saw what the answer was going to be, I laughed out loud. I laughed out loud when I saw what the answer was going to be.

That must have been hard to put together -- very impressive. (Sorry I couldn't come up with a new pun, but the good ones argon.)

LOL given my day job I'm embarrassed to say I needed a nudge. Saw the elements right away, but got hung up on the fact that three of them appear exactly twice. Also probably didn't help that 'addition reaction' means something chemical to me, so I didn't interpret it as math (even though I was trying to add letters or pairs of letters for a while). Did the math wrong on BASE the first time, but pretty easy to spot that BISMUHG was supposed to be BISMUTH. Wonder if I could do something similar for class using the more restricted element set we deal with in organic. Hmmm. Fun stuff, thanks.

I had a hard time with "exactly two react" (all but two of the elements are noble gasses? That's not true? Only two of them had the reactions "Um" in them? That's not true. Were there two elements without the reaction "um" in them and we were supposed to ignore them? Is "Gee!" a reaction along with "um" to get G+alli+um?). I think it's only now that I think you were trying to say the reactions occur in pairs of exactly two?

I saw too many chemical symbols but only one complete row of only symbols but similar rows that were almost all symbols and we to combine symbols of one letter to get an impossible to find the beginning of and end of without having clear paths of leave that one out or pound that one with a hammer until it fits that, even though I figured out the idea of chemical symbols and adding them it took my 48 hours to figure out exactly how to do that.

Brilliant! Unlike my sloppy lab work. I literally have a photo spelling out BTeSmUThGePaSReAl - b/c I was writing down atomic #s in poor lighting, and copied my Neon up through my Sodiums (and I lazily didn’t look up HETH but had it in as HETA in the grid). My wonderful A-level Chem teacher Mr. Charlie Gulliford would wipe my A grade off the record if he only knew…

I got BISMUTH with the first 5 but not as usual so I must have made some math errors. However, as soon as I got BISMUTH, and knowing the creator, the rest was, well elementary...

Way behind on all my puzzle. One perk of that is that nudges could be out! In under the wire and loving this! Thanks, Mikey!

had the mechanism but a couple of errors sidetracked me...didn't need the nudges but they confirmed that what I had done was the correct path...finally solved before the deadline...thanks Mikey!

Not sure if I answered in time, but I didn't look at any solution to get here. :D