Flerovium

Flerovium is element 114. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made it in 1998 by firing calcium-48, a rare heavy form of calcium, at plutonium. It was named in 2012 after the institute's Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, itself named for the physicist Georgy Flerov.

Physicists hoped element 114 would lie near an island of stability, where superheavy nuclei last much longer. Its atoms do survive a few seconds, longer than many neighbors. Early experiments suggest flerovium, which sits below lead, may be a volatile, weakly reactive metal, but the results are still debated.