Word: curium
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Overstuffed Atom. Fields and his colleague Arnold Friedman decided that the best bet would be to bombard curium with carbon ions in a cyclotron. This would be quite a trick; curium, element No. 96, is itself synthetic and intensely radioactive. If any of it were fattened into element 102, the fragile, overstuffed atoms would predictably disintegrate in a few minutes...
...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...
...speed. Last week a group of University of California scientists led by Professor Glenn Seaborg told how they created Element 98, which stands six steps up the periodic table (of chemical elements) from uranium, the heaviest natural element. They did it by shooting alpha particles (helium nuclei) at curium, another synthetic element, No. 96, created by a Seaborg group...
...Californians knew that the alpha particles would have to move at just the right speed. If they moved too slowly, they would bounce off the curium nuclei. If they moved too fast, they would smash the more fragile nuclei. So the scientists adjusted their old reliable 60-inch cyclotron until it emitted alpha particles with 35 million electron volts of energy. This is not high power by modern standards (see above), but it did the trick. The alpha particles entered the curium nuclei and some of them stayed there, turning the curium into Element...
...scientists named their creation "californium" after their state and university. They did not manufacture much of it. The curium they used was an invisible film weighing a few millionths of a gram, and only a small fraction of it changed into californium. The new element proved so radioactive that half of it disintegrated in 45 minutes. It took fast action to identify it and measure some of its properties before it vanished...