The element radium can be found in extremely tiny amounts in the Earth’s crust and oceans, and in its pure form it is a soft silvery metal. To an untrained eye, a small piece of radium may look like a ...

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

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. “What is radium and why is it dangerous?” – ...

Hailed as one of the 50 most important women in science, she found ways to study rare radioactive isotopes and advanced the understanding of nuclear fission. By Delthia Ricks Darleane C. Hoffman, a ...

Building a nuclear weapon requires experts in nuclear physics, precision engineering, access to radioactive elements, and the ability to enrich and concentrate the fuel sufficiently to reach critical ...

In 1902 Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy discovered that radioactive elements, such as uranium and thorium, broke down into other elements in a predictable sequence or series. This amazing fact ...

An international team of scientists, including a University of York researcher, has carried out ground-breaking experiments to investigate the atomic structure of astatine (Z=85), the rarest naturally ...

In an ejection that would have caused its rotation to slow, a magnetar is depicted losing material into space in this artist’s concept. The magnetar’s strong, twisted magnetic field lines (shown in ...