Dennis Birch, age 11, of Bellevue, Wash., For his question:

What is einsteinium?

You can see at a glance that it was named in honor of Albert Einstein, the brilliant thinker who figured out the laws of relativity. It has the same ending as helium, barium, calcium and sodium, So perhaps it, too, is a chemical element. And so it is. Einsteinium is one of those radioactive elements discovered by modern physicists.

In November, 1952, a nuclear bomb was exploded on a Pacific island. Scientists found two new el ements in the radioactive debris. One was named in honor of einstein. Its atomic number is 99, and it is a radioactive isotope of uranium, a bigger brother of the biggest natural atom on earth.