Scientists poke and prod at the fringes of habitability in pursuit of life’s limits. To that end, they have tunneled kilometers below Earth’s surface, drilling outward from the bottom of mine shafts ...

The element radium can be found in extremely tiny amounts in the Earth’s crust and oceans, and in its pure form it is a soft silvery metal. To an untrained eye, a small piece of radium may look like a ...

In recent years, some large physics experiments worldwide have been trying to gather evidence of a nuclear process known as neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay. This is a rare process that entails ...

Radioactive decay is a fundamental process in nature by which an unstable atomic nucleus loses energy by radiation. Studying nuclear decay modes is crucial for understanding properties of atomic ...

Alpha decay represents a fundamental mode of radioactive disintegration wherein an unstable nucleus emits an alpha particle—a tightly bound cluster of two protons and two neutrons. This process not ...