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 ...

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 ...

Then, contending with radioactive decay was another challenge. The Berkeley Lab team conducted their experiments with einsteinium-254, one of the more stable isotopes of the element.

Some isotopes are stable, while others are radioactive and decay over time, emitting radiation. Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon, meaning that it undergoes beta decay, releasing electrons.

A radioactive isotope's nucleus is unstable and spontaneously decays, giving off radiation and changing into a different isotope. The rate at which nuclei decay is constant.

That's because internal heating from the radioactive decay of the heavy elements thorium and uranium drives plate tectonics and may be necessary for the planet to generate a magnetic field. Earth ...

The blue spheres are radioactive, and decay at the same rate I used in the example above. Click play to see what that might look like. Again, I made radioactive spheres disappear when they decayed.

The decay, seen in xenon-124 atoms, happens so sparingly that it would take 18 sextillion years (18 followed by 21 zeros) for a sample of xenon-124 to shrink by half, making the decay extremely ...

In fact, we could re-write the radioactive decay formula using the letters from the compound interest formula: A = Pe-rt Now, it's perfectly clear: The formulas are almost identical. The only ...

The amount of time it takes for half of a radioactive tracer to decay is called its half-life. Tl-201 has a half-life of about 3 days, whereas Tc-99 has a half-life of about 6 hours.

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, according to a new study by an ...