For decades, humanity has sent robotic explorers far beyond Earth’s comfort zone—into places where sunlight is weak, nights ...

This week's element is neptunium, which has the atomic symbol Np and atomic number 93. Neptunium was named for the planet Neptune, the next planet away from the sun after Uranus (which was uranium's ...

Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson first produced neptunium at the University of California in 1940. The scientists bombarded uranium-238 atoms with neutrons to chemically produce neptunium-239, ...

Physicists have gained new insight into the origins of superconductivity -- a property of metals where electrical resistance vanishes -- by studying exotic chemical compounds that contain neptunium ...

Scientists first created the artificial element neptunium in 1940, around the time they made the first atoms of plutonium. But because plutonium turned out to be so much better for nuclear weapons, ...

Oxidation is the process where atoms lose electrons during a chemical reaction. Among the radioactive elements, neptunium and plutonium are much harder to oxidize than uranium. To study these elements ...

It’s difficult to make molecules using elements that lie beyond uranium on the periodic table, which has hampered progress in studying how actinides form bonds. Now chemists have expanded the library ...

Not much is known about the properties of neptunium, a highly radioactive man-made material that is a byproduct of nuclear reactors, except that it emits alpha, beta and gamma radioactivity. The ...

In a recent paper published in The European Physical Journal D, researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, have demonstrated a method for more precise ionization measurements of ...

Scientists have managed to successfully make a transuranium complex where the central metal, here neptunium, forms a multiple bond to just one other element. Enabling study of such a bonding ...