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German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas speaks during a joint news conference with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, following a meeting in Moscow, Russia, May 10, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Sergei Karpukhin. The foreign minister of Germany was criticized on Monday after he expressed disapproval of the sabotaging over the weekend of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, which has been widely attributed to Israel. The details of the Natanz incident remain unclear, but reports indicate that it involved a systemic power failure caused by a massive cyber-attack, resulting in serious damage to the facility. There were no casualties in the incident. On...

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the first detonation of an atomic bomb. Now famous as the Trinity Test, the giant explosion was the culmination of the ultra-secret Manhattan project and would within weeks lead to the end of the Second World War and usher in the Atomic Age. On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 AM, the predawn darkness on what was then the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, was suddenly lit up with the light of a thousand suns....

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Danish physicist Niels Bohr was a scientific genius who also displayed a coincidental penchant for espionage and intrigue. He employed these skills, along with a bit of science, to foil the Nazi at several turns. His small crusade began in 1933 after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Over the next few years several scientists fled Germany with Bohr’s help. Many escapees went on to work on the Manhattan Project, including Edward Teller, James Franck and Otto Frisch. Some of them stayed with Bohr in Denmark, working at the Bohr Institute until moving elsewhere.

[R]esearchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter are reporting "ultrabright" electron sources with sufficient brightness to literally light up atomic motions in real time—at a time scale of 100 femtoseconds, making these sources particularly relevant to chemistry because atomic motions occur in that window of time. After seeing the first atomic movies of phase transitions in bulk thin films using high-energy (100 kilovolt) electron bunches, the researchers wondered if they could achieve atomic resolution of surface reactions—occurring within the first few monolayers of materials—to gain a better understanding of surface catalysis. So they devised...

A mysterious event detected by U.S. satellites in 1979 was the detonation of an atomic bomb. The incident correlates with an equally mysterious rise in radioactivity in sheep in nearby Australia, confirming that a nuclear test took place. Experts believe that Israel and South Africa conducted a secret joint test of a tactical nuclear weapon in the Indian Ocean, hoping it would escape detection. On September 22, 1979, a U.S. Vela satellite, part of the globe-scanning U.S. Nuclear Detonation Detection System (NDS), detected the characteristic “double flash” of a nuclear weapon. Nuclear bombs produce two distinct flashes: the superheating of...

VIENNA, Austria — The chief inspector of the UN’s nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resigned Friday, a spokesperson for the agency said. No reason was given for Tero Varjoranta’s sudden departure, which comes days after US President Donald Trump took America out of the deal between Iran and world powers over its nuclear program.

An undercover MI6 agent is sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a missing list of double agents.

71 years ago, the crew of the B-29 Enola Gay under the command of Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, operating under General Curtis LeMay, dropped the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare on Hiroshima Japan. We all know (or should know) the story. Today's sob sisters and history revisionists all make the same whining and wailing excuses for why America should not have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, but just like the radioactive dust those bombs produced, the opinions of such low lifes will also eventually dissipate into the insignificant categories of history. And God Bless President Harry...

5:30 A.M., Monday July 16th, 1945: The day dawned brighter than ever before over the New Mexico desert. But it was not the Sun's soothing rays that set the landscape alight; it was the radiant flash of the very first atomic bomb. Trinity, the nuclear offspring of the Manhattan Project, detonated with the force of 21,000 tons of TNT. The accompanying fireball reached temperatures of 8,430 degrees Kelvin, hotter than the surface of the sun, and sent a mushroom cloud of smoke and debris soaring more than seven miles into the sky. That day, every human on the planet was...

Ron Cowen 3-22-2016 In tunnels deep inside a granite mountain at Daya Bay, a nuclear reactor facility some 55 kilometers from Hong Kong, sensitive detectors are hinting at the existence of a new form of neutrino, one of nature’s most ghostly and abundant elementary particles.Neutrinos, electrically neutral particles that sense only gravity and the weak nuclear force, interact so feebly with matter that 100 trillion zip unimpeded through your body every second. They come in three known types: electron, muon and tau. The Daya Bay results suggest the possibility that a fourth, even more ghostly type of neutrino exists —...

Nucleons consist (left) of quarks (matter particles) and gluons (force particles). A glueball (right) is made up purely of gluons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) have calculated that the meson f0(1710) could be a very special particle – the long-sought-after glueball, a particle composed of pure force. For decades, scientists have been looking for so-called "glueballs". Now it seems they have been found at last. A glueball is an exotic particle, made up entirely of gluons – the "sticky" particles that keep nuclear particles together. Glueballs are unstable and can only be detected indirectly, by analysing their decay. This...

Scientists have succeeded in making a clock so precise it could tick for 15 billion years – longer than the age of the Universe – without gaining or losing a second. The new research, described in Nature Communications in April, sets a world record for timekeeping and is a three-fold improvement over the previous record, set by the same clock in Boulder, Colorado, last year. On a practical level, the optical lattice atomic clock Jun Ye and his colleagues at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology are developing could replace the caesium atomic clocks used in GPS systems,...

Sixty-one years ago on an island in the South Pacific, scientists and military officers, fishermen and Marshall Islands natives observed first-hand what Armageddon would be like. And it almost killed them all. The Atomic Energy Commission code-named the nuclear test Castle Bravo. The March 1, 1954 experiment was the first thermonuclear explosion based on practical technology that would lead to a deliverable H-bomb for the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command—part of the Operation Castle series of tests needed to manufacture the high-yield weapons. Bravo was the worst radiological disaster in American atomic testing history—but the test provided information that led...

A clock that is so accurate it will lose just one second in 16 billion years has been created by scientists. The device, made using super-cooled atoms held within a lattice of laser beams, is around 1,000 times more precise than the atomic clocks currently used to define time. Researchers say clocks with this level of accuracy could open up new areas of science by allowing tiny changes fluctuations in the strength of gravity to be measured.

A new record-breaking atomic clock is so precise it neither loses nor gains a second in five billion years - longer than the age of the Earth. The 'strontium lattice clock' is 50% more accurate than the previous record holder, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) quantum logic clock. Researchers say the clock is so accurate, it can even reveal the effect gravity has on time.

Video Link Here Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie is a 1995 American documentary film directed by Peter Kuran and narrated by William Shatner. Using restored archive footage, the film traces the development of nuclear weapons and their testing, from America's Trinity test of 1945 (hence the title) to the first Chinese atomic bomb test in 1964. Kuran's commentary on the DVD version claims that the DVD replaces some of the original footage with better-quality versions. There are some short special effects sequences too.

Professor Philip Moriarty expresses his displeasure with oft-repeated belief that atoms do no physically touch each other.

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Workers are preparing to enter one of the most dangerous rooms on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation — the site of a 1976 blast that exposed a technician to a massive dose of radiation, leading to him being nicknamed the "Atomic Man." Harold McCluskey was working in the room when a chemical reaction caused a glass glove box to explode. He was exposed to the highest dose of radiation from the chemical element americium ever recorded — 500 times the occupational standard. Hanford, located in central Washington state, made plutonium for nuclear weapons for decades. The room...

Atoms trapped by light and measured with a CCD camera have the potential to outdo today's most accurate atomic clocks, and although it's early days, a pair of linked optical lattice clocks have yielded accuracy of a second every 300 million years. In doing so, the group that performed the test, outlined here in Nature and published in full in Nature Communications say their experiment performed at the limit of experimental accuracy, outperforming three linked caesium-based atomic clocks. Ever since 1967, the time standard has been governed by cesium clocks, in which the transition of atoms between high- and low-energy...