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Creating Designer Isotopes
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to a Michigan State University (MSU) news release, 'Made-to-order isotopes hold promise on science's frontier,' nuclear physicists can now start a new career as isotope designers. These scientists can build specific rare isotopes to solve scientific problems and open doors to new technologies. The lead researcher says this approach has already given us the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan technology. He's now going further, saying that he wants to build objects 100,000 times smaller than the atomic nucleus. He calls this 'femtotechnology.' Also available are additional details and pictures of the tools used for this kind of research, picked from a 415-page design paper." Update: 05/11 14:30 GMT by SS: Readers have noted that the summary inaccurately portrays the scale of the 'femtotechnology.' The MSU researcher refers to "the capacity to construct objects on an even more minute scale, that of the atomic nucleus 100,000 times smaller."
The chemical changes that brought about the formation of the elements in the bellies of stars...
If you're changing elements from one to another, it's not a chemical change. It's nuclear! That's one of the definitions of a nuclear change. What kind of science journalism is this?
There is no 'technically' about it: they do feel the strong force. However, as far as we know, you cannot create a bound state of just gluons - a so-called glue-ball - although it is possible that it may exist with a very short lifetime. If it had a long live time then, like the photon, being colour-neutral it would not feel the strong force and so would cause a long range strong nuclear force!
This is actually a rather important as it explains why Quarks are never found in isolation.
Actually you can observe single quarks - I've even done it! Top quarks decay so incredibly quickly (10^-24 s) that they decay as an isolated quark. This is because hadronization takes time and the top quark does not hang around that long. So a more correct statement is to say that at low energies quarks are never found in isolation. At high energies quarks exhibit what we call asymptotic freedom (the opposite of the low energy confinement which is what you described).