Europe’s upcoming Mars mission will use a pioneering nuclear-powered device that harnesses the radioactive decay of americium to keep its components warm — a first for spacecraft. The European Space ...

What’s going on with this silent threat that can stealthily damage your body in ways that can take years to reveal themselves ...

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 ...

Alpha decay represents a fundamental mode of radioactive disintegration wherein an unstable nucleus emits an alpha particle—a tightly bound cluster of two protons and two neutrons. This process not ...

Scientists poke and prod at the fringes of habitability in pursuit of life’s limits. To that end, they have tunneled kilometers below Earth’s surface, drilling outward from the bottom of mine shafts ...

From mysterious dark matter to the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei, the past 12 months have reiterated just how strange particle physics can be. When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

Earth must have experienced something exceptional 10 million years ago. Our study of rock samples from the floor of the Pacific Ocean has found a strange increase in the radioactive isotope ...

At this point, atomic clocks are old news. They’ve been quietly keeping our world on schedule for decades now, and have been through several iterations with each generation gaining more accuracy. They ...

The Becquerel (Bq) is an SI unit of radioactivity: one becquerel is equivalent to one radioactive decay per second. That absolutely does not make it equivalent to one hertz — the random nature of ...