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 ...

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 ...

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 ...