 | GenghisTheHun (179)
01/13/2007 |  This is one of the really rare elements and has only been found after bombarding Californium with atomic particles. As a nice touch it was named after Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron.
What is great about this element is that scientists don't know what it would look like if they had a chunk of it, and if they did have a chunk of it, it would pose a severe radiation hazard!
It would be extremely heavy, much heavier than lead. Lead has an atomic weight of about 204 and Lawrencium has approximately a 262 atomic weight in its most stable isotope.
Atomic weight of an element is determined by adding up its nucleus parts, protons and neutrons.
A cubic inch of lead and a cubic inch of Lawrencium would almost certainly have the same number of atoms because of the space in between each atom in a structure, and each atom is relatively about the same size. So none of the Lawrencium atoms is going to get crowded out because Lawrencium atoms are bigger than lead atoms.
If you have a quintillion atoms weighing 262 and a quintillion atoms weighing 204, in a cubic inch of pure substance, well you figure out the weights, learned members of the RIA.
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 | AndrewScott (73)
03/07/2006 | I just kinda like the name of this rare, radioactive metal. Lawrencium comes from Californium. (Or, in scientific lingo, it's synthesized by bombarding the Californium isotope with ions.)
Lawrencium is one of the newer elements on the block, with its potential practical uses still untapped by the (surely clueless) scientific community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrencium
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