Short answers, pulled from the story.
Einsteinium was discovered in December 1952 by Albert Ghiorso and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Argonne and Los Alamos National Laboratories. They identified it in fallout from the Ivy Mike thermonuclear test on the 1st of November 1952 at Enewetak Atoll, after uranium nuclei in the bomb captured 15 neutrons in rapid succession and underwent seven beta decays.
The Berkeley team, led by Albert Ghiorso, proposed naming element 99 einsteinium after Albert Einstein when announcing the discovery at the first Geneva Atomic Conference in August 1955. Einstein had died between the time the name was first proposed and when it was formally announced. Element 100, found simultaneously, was named fermium after Enrico Fermi, who also died in that interval.
The most common isotope, einsteinium-253, is produced in quantities on the order of one milligram per year in dedicated high-power nuclear reactors. The primary production facilities are the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the SM-2 reactor in Dimitrovgrad, Russia. After separation procedures, the isotopically pure yield is roughly ten times lower than the raw amount.
Einsteinium has almost no practical applications outside basic scientific research. Its most notable use was in 1955, when it was irradiated to synthesize 17 atoms of mendelevium, element 101, for the first time. Einsteinium-254 was used as a calibration marker in the alpha-scattering surface analyzer of the Surveyor 5 lunar probe, and it has been used as a target in attempts to synthesize superheavy elements including ununennium (element 119).
Einsteinium is difficult to study for several reasons. Its most common isotope, einsteinium-253, has a half-life of only 20.47 days, making samples scarce and short-lived. Its radioactivity releases about 1,000 watts per gram, producing a visible glow and rapidly destroying its own crystal structure. It also contaminates itself at a rate of about 3.3% per day as it decays through berkelium-249 into californium-249.
The most stable isotope is einsteinium-252, with a half-life of 471.7 days. The most commonly produced isotope, einsteinium-253, has a much shorter half-life of 20.47 days. Eighteen isotopes and four nuclear isomers of einsteinium are known in total, with mass numbers ranging from 240 to 257; all are radioactive.