Why do some elements decay in minutes, while others last billions of years? Certain "magic numbers" of nuclear particles may ...

The amount of long-lived radioactive elements incorporated into a rocky planet as it forms may be a crucial factor in determining its future habitability. That's because internal heating from the ...

Stars exploding as supernovae are the main sources of heavy chemical elements in the Universe. In particular, radioactive atomic nuclei are synthesized in the hot, innermost regions during the ...

Water once flowed through asteroid Ryugu and possibly in early solar system, Japanese researchers claim Experts have ...

Hickory dickory dock, this nucleus could make a great clock. A special variety of the element thorium hosts an atomic nucleus that could be used to keep time, scientists say. In a first, researchers ...

The Standard Model of physics, which explains the properties and interactions of the fundamental particles, does a phenomenal job with the things it gets right, and there's nothing that it obviously ...

A battery made of diamonds could power devices for thousands of years, scientists have announced. This battery would be powered by a diamond surrounding a radioactive isotope of carbon known as carbon ...

Uranium is a radioactive metal central to one of the most devastating acts of war in history. On Aug. 6, 1945, a 10-foot-long (3 meters) bomb fell from the sky over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Element 99 — mysterious and exceptionally radioactive — sits inconspicuously in the bottom row of the periodic table. Named for legendary physicist Albert Einstein, einsteinium has been one of the ...