Nobelium

Nobelium has a tangled history. In 1957 a team at the Nobel Institute of Physics in Stockholm claimed to have made element 102 and proposed naming it after Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prizes. Their result could not be repeated, and Berkeley scientists made disputed claims too. Definitive work came in the 1960s from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, in the Soviet Union, which got the credit, but the name nobelium stuck.

It can be made by firing beams of light nuclei, such as carbon, at targets of curium. Its longest-lived form lasts about an hour. Unlike most of its neighbors, nobelium prefers to lose just two electrons when it forms compounds.