Short answers, pulled from the story.
Californium was first synthesized on about the 9th of February 1950 at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley by Stanley Gerald Thompson, Kenneth Street Jr., Albert Ghiorso, and Glenn T. Seaborg. The team announced the discovery on the 17th of March 1950.
The discoverers named californium after the University of California and the state of California where it was created. The element directly above californium in the periodic table is dysprosium, whose name means "hard to get at"; the researchers noted that reaching California had also been difficult for searchers a century before them, so they set aside the usual naming convention.
Californium is produced at only two locations: Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad, Russia. As of 2003, Oak Ridge produces 0.25 grams per year and the Russian facility produces 0.025 grams per year.
Californium-252 is used as a startup neutron source for nuclear reactors, for neutron radiography of aircraft and weapons components to detect corrosion and cracks, for fuel rod scanning, for elemental analysis in the coal and cement industries, and for treatment of certain cervical and brain cancers. By 1994, neutron radiography accounted for 77.4 percent of its use.
Californium that enters the body deposits mainly in the skeleton (about 65 percent) and the liver (about 25 percent), where it releases radiation that disrupts red blood cell formation and can cause cancer. Only 0.05 percent of ingested californium reaches the bloodstream; californium in the skeleton takes roughly 50 years for half of it to clear.
Californium-251 is the most stable of the element's twenty known isotopes, with a half-life of 898 years. The most commonly used isotope, californium-252, has a much shorter half-life of about 2.645 years.
In October 2006, researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, bombarded californium-249 with calcium-48 ions and identified three atoms of oganesson, element 118. The target held about 10 milligrams of californium deposited on a titanium foil with an area of 32 square centimeters.