This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Meitner and Frisch were able to provide an ...

Physicist Leo Szilard, the scientist who conceived of a nuclear chain reaction, worked on the Manhattan Project when he moved to the United States. * Photo: Corbis * 1933: Physicist Leo Szilard gets ...

Some scientific anniversaries celebrate events so momentous that they capture the attention of many nonscientists as well — or even the entire world. One such anniversary is upon us. December 2 marks ...

Back in science class everyone learned that a chain reaction is a sequence of reactions that causes additional reactions to take place. In nuclear physics, what happens to a single neutron can result ...

During the early 1950s America went bonkers over the budding atomic age. The growth of Las Vegas, for example, was partially due to a new bomb-testing site situated 65 miles northwest of the gambling ...