Editing Chalcogen (section)

===Modern discoveries===
In the late 19th century, [[Marie Curie]] and [[Pierre Curie]] discovered that a sample of [[pitchblende]] was emitting four times as much radioactivity as could be explained by the presence of uranium alone. The Curies gathered several tons of pitchblende and refined it for several months until they had a pure sample of polonium. The discovery officially took place in 1898. Prior to the invention of particle accelerators, the only way to produce polonium was to extract it over several months from uranium ore.<ref name="ReferenceB"/>

The first attempt at creating livermorium was from 1976 to 1977 at the [[LBNL]], who bombarded curium-248 with calcium-48, but were not successful. After several failed attempts in 1977, 1998, and 1999 by research groups in Russia, Germany, and the US, livermorium was created successfully in 2000 at the [[Joint Institute for Nuclear Research]] by bombarding [[curium]]-248 atoms with calcium-48 atoms. The element was known as ununhexium until it was officially named livermorium in 2012.<ref name="ReferenceB"/>