More than 75 years after its initial discovery, scientists have created an organometallic molecule containing the transuranium element berkelium. According to a new study, the electronic signature of the actinide element acts differently than lanthanides, which is what scientists previously expected. Understanding the atomic behavior of transuranium elements can help scientists tackle real-world issues like nuclear waste storage and remediation. In December 1949, University of California at Berkeley chemist Glenn Seaborg, along with Stanley Thompson and Albert Ghiorso, bombarded an isotope of the actinide americium, only discovered five years prior, with helium nuclei in a cyclotron. This created an entirely new element known (fittingly) as berkelium, and was one major step toward Seaborg's eventual Nobel Prize win in 1951 for his discoveries of transuranium (i.e. elements with a higher atomic number of 92) elements. However, that was only the beginning of berkelium's story, and now more than 75 years later, scientists from the same laboratory that first discovered the element—the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)— along with scientists from the University of Buffalo and Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Romania has successfully created the first…