There are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, the more exotic the isotope, the shorter its half life (the average time it takes before undergoing beta-decay and transforming into a slightly more stable element). For most elements there are usually just one to two stable forms. All others will decay, and the further in mass you get from the stable forms, the quicker this decay happens. It's kind of hard to make any physical object with a material that exists for a fraction of a second. Second, for any given element there is a lower mass and an upper mass boundary. There is a physical limit to what types of particles one can create. Beyond these boundaries, called the driplines when applied to the entire nuclear chart, particles are 'unstable'. I use unstable in the vernacular nuclear sense; particles will evaporate from the core until the remaing particles are bound. This, as mentioned above, still doesn't mean the particle is 'stable' in the common sense of the word. Lastly, the NSCL cylcotron produces the rarest particles, the particles with the lowest probability for creation (i.e. very low cross section) at a very low rate, sometimes as low as an event per day. The article is about the construction of a next generation nuclear facility at the NSCL. The US as in all other science fields, is gradually falling behind European and Japanese counterparts. The few other other major nuclear labs in the world (not to be confused with the super-expensive high energy facilities like Cern and Fermilab) are bringing online new facilities that will enable nuclear researchers to study more exotic elements, elements with stranger properties closer to that limit of stability. The MSU proposal is located here: http://www.nscl.msu.edu/future/isf/. There is a lot of interesting research to be done. Many of the biggest unanswered questions in physics are in nuclear physics. One mentioned in the article is the creation of elements. We are indeed created from stars, since the big bang left us with just some helium and hydrogen. The other elements are created in nuclear processes that occur in the giant nuclear furnaces of stars. Interested folks should look online for additional information. There is a incredibly large region of the nuclear chart that currently cannot be reached because present beam facilities don't have the energies and intensities to produce the particles at a rate sufficient for research. It would be very neat if we could get there.