Californium is a radioactive element, which does not occur naturally on earth. Therefore it needs to be produced artificially. It is named after the city of Berkeley, California, where it was discovered. It is considered as one of the most expensive materials on earth: One gram of the isotope Californium-252 costs up to 60 million US$!
Berkelium is a radioactive element, which does not occur naturally on earth. Therefore it needs to be produced artificially. It is named after the city of Berkeley, California, where it was discovered.
Americium is a radioactive element, which does not occur naturally on earth. Therefore it needs to be produced artificially. It was named after the Americas, because it was discovered in America and in the periodic table it is positioned right below europium.
There is no picture of the corresponding element, yet. Urano and Pluton, the rulers of the underworld, are trying to make new monsters through nuclear fusion. They need new monsters to build a clone army in order to take over the world. Unfortunately these experiments fail regularely.
Neptunium is a toxic and radioactive heavy metal, which exists on earth only in extremely small traces. It was named after planet Neptune, the neighbour of Uranus, since the element is the neighbour of uranium in the periodic table. It is only used in nuclear technology, specifically for atomic batteries.
The name is a combination of the greek prefix proto ("first" or "before", "original") and the element actinium, because it is the precursor of actinium in the so called decay chain of uranium.
Thorium is named after the nordic god Thor. Even though the element is radioactive, it has a half life of 14 billion years (in its most important isotope) – therefore more stable than uranium. It was formerly used for gas mantles in lamps.
The name actinium comes from the greek word aktis meaning "ray", because it generates radioactive rays and glows in the dark. It is name patron for a whole group of elements: the actinides. Because of its strong radioactivity there are only a few very special applications for it.
The story of radium is quite sad. After it was discovered, people were fascinated by this element which glows in the dark. Nobody knew that this was because of its harmful radioactivity. There was a hype around products containing radium, which were sold as cures and cosmetics. Only after workers, who painted glow-in-the-dark paint containing radium onto wrist-watches, began to develop cancer in the mouth, people started to realize that there was something wrong.
Francium is considered as the most unstable natural occurring element. Several scientists unsuccessfully claimed the discovery, but finally in the year 1939 Maguerite Perey was able to provide evidence and named it after her homeland France. The radioactivity is two million times higher than plutonium. Therefore it is impossible to produce visible amounts of it, the sample woud immediately evaporate because of the heat generated by its own radioactivity.
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