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 ...

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 ...

In this lesson, students will simulate the randomness of decay in radioactive atoms and visualize the half-life of a sample radioactive element. This lesson can be completed in two (2) 45-minute class ...

Scientists have discovered and synthesized an entirely new isotope of the highly radioactive element uranium. But it might last only 40 minutes before decaying into other elements. The new isotope, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...