Word: californium
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...Monday that experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, announced they, along with colleagues at Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Dubna, have produced an atom with 118 protons. Three atoms, actually. And all it took was smashing "bullets" of calcium at a target of Californium about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 times...
...want to make a statement with a really, really expensive metal, you could go with osmium. My personal favorite is gadolinium. When you say it fast, it sings. On the more fanciful side, californium, for the laid-back customer, einsteinium, for the exceptionally wise money manager, neptunium, for stratospheric credit limits, and, for those just starting out, lead. --Tim Foecke, metallurgist, National Institute of Standards and Technology
...Chemist Glenn Seaborg, the former Atomic Energy Commission chairman who won a Nobel Prize for synthesizing element No. 94 (plutonium). The Berkeley scientists used a newly beefed-up particle accelerator called Super-HILAC (for heavy ion linear accelerator) to send nuclei of oxygen atoms barreling into another artificial element, californium. As occasional collisions occurred between the oxygen and californium nuclei, they fused and formed the heavier nucleus of element 106-but not for long. Like most artificial elements, No. 106 is extremely unstable. It has a half-life of only nine-tenths of a second-that is, half...
...detectors to monitor their results, a team ol physicists led by Albert Ghiorso used the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's heavy-ion linear accelerator (HILAC) to shoot nitrogen 15 nuclei with an energy level of 84 million electron volts at a submicroscopic bit of californium 249. Although a constant stream of nuclei was directed at the target, only about six collisions per hour produced atoms of the new element...
...nuclei of the nitrogen 15 and californium 249 atoms met, they fused into a single nucleus containing a total of 260 neutrons and protons (four neutrons were shed in the process). Of these particles, 105 were protons, the positively charged particles that determine the atomic number of the element. Since there were 105 protons, the nucleus of the 105th element had been created...