Radioactive potassium, common enough on Earth to make potassium-rich bananas one of the “hottest” foods around, appears also to be a substantial source of heat in the Earth’s core, according to recent ...

The Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb wasn't without its own dangers. Experiments on a so-called "demon core" of plutonium caused the deaths of two Manhattan Project physicists. Both ...

Polly Arnold is drawn to challenging problems at the far reaches of the periodic table. “It’s all about the f block,” she says of the work in her group, which is split between the University of ...

Two decades in the making, a new flagship facility for nuclear physics opened on May 2, and scientists from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have a hand in 10 of its first 34 ...

After a year of fastidious planning, a microscopic sample of the ultra-rare radioactive element berkelium arrived at a Berkeley Lab. With just 48 hours to experiment before it would become unusable, a ...

Nobel laureate Otto Hahn is credited with the discovery of nuclear fission. Fission is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, yet Hahn considered something else to be his best ...

In this lesson, students will investigate the nature of radioactivity and the effect of both distance and shielding materials on different radioactive sources using a Geiger-Muller tube with a counter ...

Chemists could more readily study the properties of rare radioactive materials by bonding them to bulky companions 1. Some of the radioactive elements known as actinides are so scarce that just a few ...

An international team of researchers, led by scientists of GSI/FAIR in Darmstadt, Germany, has studied r-process nucleosynthesis in measurements conducted at the Canadian research center TRIUMF in ...