This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American On August 29, 1982, nearly 44 years after ...

The Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award celebrates breakthrough publications, books, and patents worldwide that have been revolutionary in concept, expansive in scope, and impactful in the long ...

There is a memorable scene in “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster film about the building of the atomic bomb, in which Luis Alvarez, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, is reading a ...

On March 20, the American Chemical Society’s Division of the History of Chemistry (HIST) presented a 2023 Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award plaque to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in ...

In a discovery that portends the possibility of atomic bombs, Otto Hahn (right) and Fritz Strassmann report evidence that uranium atoms produce barium when bombarded with neutrons. As explained by ...

In 1939 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann announced that uranium nuclei "burst" when they are bombarded with neutrons. How they came to this conclusion is a classic example of the nature of science ...