#isotopes

I'm not limited to just isotopes and regular elements nuhuh i'm doing compounds too! Heres the 5th batch, with TWICE the amount of cattos i usually do just as a gift of appreciation!

Lithium-6 is essential for producing nuclear fusion fuel, but isolating it from the much more common isotope, lithium-7, usually requires liquid mercury, which is extremely toxic. Now, researchers have developed a mercury-free method to isolate lithium-6 that is as effective as the conventional method. The new method is presented March 20 in the Cell Press journal Chem. "This is a step towards addressing a major roadblock to nuclear energy," says chemist and senior author Sarbajit Banerjee of ETH Zürich and Texas A&M University. "Lithium-6 is a critical material for the renaissance of nuclear energy, and this method could represent a viable approach to isotope separation."

Whenever I think about this, I inevitably think about how radiocarbon dating exploits isotopes to measure geological artifacts.

Or how strontium is preserved in bone and tooth enamel, and can be used to potentially identify where someone may have lived in their early life.

The Scientific Research Notes Of S. Sunkavally. Printed Part, Page 351.

What an isotope is. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. 1953.

A newly observed isotope of oxygen is defying all our expectations for how it should behave. It's oxygen-28, with the highest number of neutrons ever seen in the nucleus of an oxygen atom. Yet, while scientists believe it should be stable, it decays rapidly – calling into question what we thought we knew about "magic" numbers of particles in the nucleus of an atom.