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Rutherfordium

Lord Rutherford, a New Zealand physicist and chemist, made major contributions to his respective research fields during the early 20^th century. In honour of his contributions, the 104^th element was named rutherfordium.

Two groups of scientists discovered this element independently during the 1960s – one group from Russia in 1964 and the other from the United States in 1969.

Rutherfordium is a highly radioactive synthetic element. Because of its extremely short half-life, only a few atoms of this element have ever been synthesized. For this reason, rutherfordium is of research interest only and has no applications.