The Isle of Doctor Seaborg (2013)

He was my freshman advisor in 1981-82. He loved talking with undergrads, introduced us advisees to other faculty members over regular lunches, and encouraged us to pursue research. He spoke of the Valley a few times and hoped he'd live to see it. Just an all-around impressive person who, at nearly 70 years of age, would walk up and down the steep hill to his office at Lawrence Berkeley Lab instead of taking the shuttle bus.

I didn't learn until much later that he was from, the same small Michigan town as Kelly Johnson of Skunkworks fame. Johnson was two years older. Ishpeming did pretty well!

Experiments that are both difficult and expensive on earth may be happening quite easily -- and free of charge -- during neutron-star mergers or supernovae events quite far away. We can't see them happening, but astronomers can detect oddly high abundances of likely fission products from the decay of such super-heavy elements.

More details appeared in this Science magazine report (December 2023) from about a dozen North American researchers. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf1341#con1 They found elevated amounts of elements such as silver (47) and platinum (78), which they believe are likely to be fission products emerging from ultra-heavy elements created by rapid neutron capture that occurs when stars go wild. (My language, not theirs.)

They posit that the elements involved have atomic masses of 260 or higher. At the low end, that's right around Bohrium (107), and the high end could go a lot higher.

always upvote damninteresting.