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 ...

Actinides are a group of elements at the bottom of the periodic table. They have a high density, are radioactive, and several of them only exist for a few seconds before they decay. Only four of the ...

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 ...