Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lord
Speaker 1: vocal bomb Here. On November one of nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: a team of American scientists working for the US military
Speaker 1: through the switch on a strange three story structure code
Speaker 1: named ivy MIC. It was the world's first hydrogen bomb,
Speaker 1: a new breed of nuclear weapon that was seven hundred
Speaker 1: times more powerful than the atomic bombs they had deployed
Speaker 1: during World War Two. The bomb test took place on
Speaker 1: a tiny toll named in a Wee Talk in the
Speaker 1: Marshall Islands of the South Pacific. When ivy MIC was detonated,
Speaker 1: it released ten point four megatons of explosive power, which
Speaker 1: means it was roughly the equivalent of ten point four
Speaker 1: million tons of TNT. The bomb dropped in Hiroshima, for comparison,
Speaker 1: produced just fifteen kilotons. The explosion utterly vaporized the atoll
Speaker 1: and produced a mushroom cloud three minds or five kilometers wide.
Speaker 1: Workers in protective suits gathered fall up material from a
Speaker 1: neighboring island and sent it back to Berkeley Lab in
Speaker 1: California for analysis. There, a team of Manhattan Project researchers
Speaker 1: led by Albert Giorso isolated just two hundred atoms of
Speaker 1: a brand new element containing ninety nine protons and ninety
Speaker 1: nine electrons. In nineteen fifty five. The researchers announced their
Speaker 1: discovery to the world and named it after their scientific hero.
Speaker 1: It's called Einsteinium. Einsteinium occupies atomic number ninety nine on
Speaker 1: the periodic table, in the company of other very heavy
Speaker 1: and radioactive elements like californium and berkeleyem Some such elements,
Speaker 1: notably uranium, exist in meaningful qualities on Earth at two
Speaker 1: point eight parts per million. There's more uranium underground than
Speaker 1: gold above. Others, including einsteinium, are too unstable to be
Speaker 1: found in nature. All of our samples of them have
Speaker 1: been synthetic. That is, created artificially by doing something like
Speaker 1: exploding a hydrogen bomb or slamming subatomic particles together in
Speaker 1: a reactor. When we think of radioactivity, we often think
Speaker 1: of the effect that it has on us. How radium
Speaker 1: or uranium can make us very sick. That's because of
Speaker 1: the type of subatomic particles or waves that they give
Speaker 1: off as they break down on an atomic level. So
Speaker 1: what makes an element radioactive In the case of einsteinium,
Speaker 1: and its neighbors at the bottom of the periodic table.
Speaker 1: It's the sheer size of their atoms for the article.
Speaker 1: This episode is based on how Stuff Works. Spoke with
Speaker 1: Joseph Glitch, a pharmaceutical chemist who has worked extensively with
Speaker 1: other radioactive elements used for medical imaging. He explained, when
Speaker 1: elements get to be a certain size, the nucleus of
Speaker 1: the atom becomes so large that it disintegrates. What happens
Speaker 1: is that it spits out neutrons and or protons and
Speaker 1: electrons and decays down to a lower elemental state. So
Speaker 1: you get two effects out of this process. First, you
Speaker 1: have those sub atomic particles or electromagnetic waves that the
Speaker 1: element emits. These can be alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays,
Speaker 1: or other types of radiation. Some types are relatively harmless,
Speaker 1: while others can inflict damage on human cells and DNA.
Speaker 1: A second, as the element breaks down, you wind up
Speaker 1: with different isotopes of the element. Isotopes are forms of
Speaker 1: an element that have different atomic weights. An atom's atomic
Speaker 1: weight is the number of protons plus neutrons in its nucleus.
Speaker 1: Just for example, the einsteinium collected in the South Pacific
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty two was an isotope called einsteinium two
Speaker 1: fifty three, which has ninety nine protons and one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty four neutrons. But these isotopes don't last forever.
Speaker 1: They each have a different half life, which is the
Speaker 1: estimated time for half of the material to decay into
Speaker 1: a new isotope or a lower numbered element. Altogether, Einsteinium
Speaker 1: two fifty three has half life of just twenty and
Speaker 1: a half days. Uranium two thirty eight, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: has a half life of four point four to six
Speaker 1: billion years, which explains why it's the most common isotope
Speaker 1: of uranium found in nature. It has major staying power.
Speaker 1: One of the hard things about synthesizing heavy radioactive elements
Speaker 1: like einsteinium in the lab and by lab we mean
Speaker 1: highly specialized nuclear reactors, is that such large atoms start
Speaker 1: to decay very quickly. Bleach said, As you create bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger elements and isotopes, it gets more and more
Speaker 1: difficult to keep them around long enough to see them.
Speaker 1: That's why there was so much excitement recently in the
Speaker 1: chemistry world when a team of scientists successfully held onto
Speaker 1: a sample of short life of einsteinium long enough to
Speaker 1: measure some of the chemical properties of this ultra rare element.
Speaker 1: The scientists, led by a team out of Berkeley Lab,
Speaker 1: waited patiently for a tiny sample at einsteinium two fifty
Speaker 1: four produced by the Oakridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The
Speaker 1: sample weighed in at two hundred and fifty nanograms that's
Speaker 1: just two hundred and fifty billionths of a gram. It
Speaker 1: had a half life of two hundred and seventy six days.
Speaker 1: When the COVID nineteen pandemic hit in twenty twenty, the
Speaker 1: research was sidelined for months, during which seven percent of
Speaker 1: the sample degraded every thirty days. Their breakthrough was the
Speaker 1: creation of a molecular claw, so to speak, that could
Speaker 1: hold a single atom of einsteinium two fifty four in
Speaker 1: place for long enough to measure things like the length
Speaker 1: of its molecular bonds and at what wavelength it emits light.
Speaker 1: Both of these measurements are critical to understanding how einsteinium
Speaker 1: and its heavy cousins could potentially be used for things
Speaker 1: like cancer treatment in the future. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article Scientists unlock secrets of h bomb element
Speaker 1: Einsteinium on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Dave Ruse.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership
Speaker 1: with Howstuffwork dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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