Word: cesium
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They are the best thing to happen to pure carbon since the diamond: 60-atom molecules that are neither pyramid shape (like diamonds) nor hexagonal (like graphite) but spherical, like soccer balls. Captured for the first time in 1991 in computer-generated "snapshots" (seen here with cesium-based handles -- the rabbit ears on top), these namesakes of Buckminster Fuller might someday be fashioned into tiny ball bearings, featherweight batteries or even superconducting wires that are just one molecule thick...
...properties. Certainly, cold atoms can be trapped and manipulated in a variety of cunning ways. The fountains created by Chu, for example, are enabling scientists to observe atoms in free fall and thus measure gravitational force with unprecedented accuracy. Fountains are also helping scientists measure the oscillations of cesium atoms more precisely than ever before, and cesium atoms are to atomic clocks -- the world's most precise timepieces -- what quartz crystals are to wristwatches...
...public's dread centers on the radioactive elements that remain in spent fuel rods after atomic reactions. While such highly toxic fission products as strontium 90 and cesium 137 have half-lives of only about 30 years, other intensely radioactive substances like plutonium will endure for tens and even hundreds of millenniums, and are piling up fast. High-level waste -- that which is most radioactive -- from U.S. power plants is not voluminous. More than 30 years' worth totals 17,000 tons, a thimbleful compared with the slag that would result from generating equivalent power by burning coal. Yet this waste...
...inside atoms. Ramsey's so-called separated oscillatory fields technique did not just become a valuable scientific tool; it also provided the basis for modern-day atomic clocks. Like the ticking of a pendulum in a grandfather clock, the rapid-fire (9,192,631.770 times a second) oscillations of cesium-atom nuclei, spinning like tops inside a magnetic field, can be used to pace off time...
...make these measurements, a beam of atoms, usually cesium, is sent through an oscillating magnetic field, which reverses the spin on the atoms' electrons...