Abstract
APPROXIMATELY fifty years ago the French scientific worker Bequerel discovered that certain minerals containing uranium possessed the property of producing energy in small amounts spontaneously, and apparently continuously. The Curies showed that the active substance responsible for this radioactivity in uranium minerals was not uranium itself, but was a small admixture of the rare element radium, which they were able to isolate. The activity of this concentrated material was so great that a mass of a gram of one of its salts maintained itself permanently several degrees hotter than its surroundings.
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12 January 1946
An Erratum to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/157044e0
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OLIPHANT, M. THE RELEASE OF ATOMIC ENERGY*. Nature 157, 5–7 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/157005a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/157005a0