Radioactive decay is the strange and almost mystical ability for one element to naturally and spontaneously transmute into another. In the process, those elements tend to emit deadly forms of ...

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 ...

Alpha recoil: Conceptual drawing of the experiment, which detects the nuclear decay of individual helium nuclei by embedding radioactive atoms in a micron-sized object and measuring the object’s ...