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.

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

In this configuration, the atom is not radioactive. The team instead used a technique to create an isotope of Lutetium-149, which has only 78 neutrons.

The half-life of radioactive carbon-14 is 5,730 years. If a sample of a tree (for example) contains 64 grams (g) of radioactive carbon after 5,730 years it will contain 32 g, after another 5,730 ...

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.

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.