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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."
How about detecting such "a thing" in a particle accelerator? What does it mean to be 100,000 times smaller than a single proton? Do quarks have measurable dimensions?
I don't see how Sue Nichols is wrong.
:).
She said: "Isotopes are the different versions of an element. Their nuclei have different numbers of neutrons, and thus give them different properties".
It is fairly accurate to say that isotopes are different versions of an element.
As for your remark: "Maybe she was in a hurry to go shopping", maybe you should slow down a bit?
"Blowups Happen" had quite a few predictions that ended up being reasonably close. One was that nuclear power plants would use a steam cycle. Another was being off by only a factor of two for the explosive yield of fissioning 2.5 tons of U235.
There were a few things he missed. The most important to the story line was delayed neutrons. Another was the use of computers for numerical analysis (he wrote about advances in calculus that would allow for analytical solutions of problems that are now done numerically). He way underestimated the amount of electric generation developed in the US ca 1970.