Word: americium
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With a license from the Atomic Energy Commission, a radiologist named Harris Levine began some dangerous tinkering at his New Jersey home. Using the radioactive isotope americium 241, he devised a technique for spotting counterfeit money. The trick was to contaminate the engraver's ink with a trace of a radiation-free isotope, boron 10, activate it with americium and then pick out the bills that did not properly respond to detectors...
...have been affected by various kinds of acute radiation poisoning, whose signs range from nausea and loss of hair to fatal blood diseases. But Levine's case, though hardly as serious, is highly unusual. He is one of the few people thus far who have been contaminated by americium, a man-made element that is being increasingly used by industry in smoke detectors, calibrators and antistatic devices...
...transuranian elements," i.e., elements heavier than uranium (atomic number 92). First made was neptunium (No. 93), which McMillan named after the planet just outside Uranus. Neptunium turns spontaneously into plutonium (No. 94), used in atom bombs. The other transuranian elements, also produced for the first time at Berkeley: americium (No. 95), curium (No. 96), berkelium (No. 97) and californium...
Atomic experts bombarded uranium with atomic particles from the cyclotron and produced neptunium, a new "synthetic" element with 93 electrons. Next, Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg and co-workers discovered plutonium (No. 94), and, four years later, at the University of Chicago, americium (No. 95) and curium (No. 96). Last week tall, gaunt, 37-year-old Chemist Seaborg and his associates were in the news again. By bombarding americium with alpha particles, they had produced another new element, with 97 electrons...
...others: neptunium, No. 93; plutonium, No. 94; americium...