Fun Fact: Researchers at the Berkeley Radiation Lab produced just 17 atoms of element 101, so they could detect it only by radioactive decay, instead of via the chemical techniques used for elements up to 100. In a gesture of Cold War d�tente�this was 1955�the team named it after Dimitry Mendeleyev, the Russian chemist wrote down the first periodic table after noticing patterns in the chemistry of elements when ordered according to atomic weight.