JULY 1955

NEW ELEMENT--"For a few days early this year there was something new under the sun, but not much of it. Chemists at the University of California had made 17 atoms of element 101. The substance, named mendelevium (abbreviated Mv) [now Md] after the father of the periodic table, was produced by bombarding element 99 with energetic alpha particles from a cyclotron. The isotope thereby obtained, the atomic weight of which is 256, decays by spontaneous fission with a half-life somewhere between half an hour and several hours."

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