Plutonium has captured the attention of scientists since its discovery in the early 1940s. This enigmatic element has an ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Radioactive material gets a bad rap, what with radiation and fallout and nuclear waste and all. But it offers some practical uses. One of the coolest (OK, maybe the coolest) is using radioactive ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Deep under an Italian mountainside, a giant detector filled with tons of liquid xenon has been looking for dark matter—particles of a mysterious substance whose effects we can see in the universe, but ...