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Mendelevium is a synthetic, radioactive element with atomic number 101. It has a short half-life and is difficult to study due to its trace amounts. It is used in scientific research and was discovered in 1955 by a team at the University of California, Berkeley. It poses a potential risk to human health but is usually handled with precautions.
Mendelevium is a metallic chemical element classified among the actinide elements of the periodic table. Little is known about this element, as it does not appear in nature and is expensive and time consuming to synthesize. Because the element can only really be studied and processed in trace amounts, no commercial uses have been developed for mendelevium, although it is used in scientific research.
This element is produced by bombarding other elements with charged particles. Typically einsteinium isotopes are used to produce mendelevium, although other elements can potentially be used as well. Like other elements that can only be produced synthetically, mendelevium exists only in trace amounts at any given time. It has a relatively short half-life, ranging from a few minutes to a few months, depending on the isotope being generated.
This element is identified on the periodic table with the symbol Md, and has atomic number 101, placing it in the transuranic elements. Transuranium elements are elements with atomic numbers greater than that of uranium and share a number of properties, most notably instability and reactivity. They also presumably share many chemical properties, although the chemical properties of elements such as mendelevium are not really known, as it is difficult to derive useful information from the traces generated through synthesis.
Credit for the discovery of this element is typically given to a team of physicists at the University of California, Berkeley who discovered the element in 1955. Glenn Seaborg and Albert Ghiorso were two notable members of the team, which also included Bernard Harvey , Gregory Choppin and Stanley Thompson. The men proposed “mendelevium” as the name for the new element, in honor of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, the developer of the first periodic table of elements.
Like other radioactive elements, mendelevium poses a potential risk to human health, although this risk is usually quite small since the element occurs only in trace amounts. People who work in laboratories with mendelevium and other radioactive elements follow procedures designed to minimize radiation exposure; these procedures typically include the use of monitoring systems that monitor radiation.
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