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In a first, researchers measure extremely small and fast changes that occur in plasma when it’s zapped with a laser. Their technique will have applications in astrophysics, medicine and fusion energy. By Ali Sundermier When you hit a piece of metal with a strong enough laser pulse you get a plasma – a hot, ionized […]

India's largest medical cyclotron - Cyclone-30 - is now operational, the country's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) announced yesterday. The cyclotron, at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre in Kolkata, will produce medical radioisotopes and will also have dedicated beamlines for material science and nuclear physics research. A cyclotron accelerates particles in a spiral path, which […]

Equipped with the right sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can help determine radiation levels after incidents in nuclear facilities as well as during routine monitoring. The Neo octocopter from FlyCam UAV. This prototype drone was built by the University of Nevada to navigate nuclear waste storage tunnels. Over the last few years, drones have become […]

Physicist Francis Perrin sat at a nuclearfuel-processing plant down in the south of France, thinking to himself: “This cannot be possible.” It was 1972. On the one hand, there was a dark piece of radioactive natural uranium ore, extracted from a mine in Africa. On the other, accepted scientific data about the constant ratio of […]

Isotopes to improve soil fertility, X-rays to produce mutations in crops or molecular markers are some of the nuclear techniques that are increasingly being applied to improve agriculture in developing countries. This was explained today at an event in Rome by Lee Heng, head of the soil and water management program of the joint division […]