Radioactive isotopes and isotopes that. Here are but some examples:

1.Carbon 14 (the most common)

A radioactive isotope of carbon, it contains six protons, six electrons, and eight neutrons. Carbon 14 is produced when neutrons bombard atoms of nitrogen. •Carbon 14 is used in a common form of radioactive dating to determine the age of ancient objects used in date archaeological, geological, and hydrogeological samples.

There are three naturally occurring isotopes of carbon on Earth: 99% of the carbon is carbon-12, 1% is carbon-13, and carbon-14 occurs in trace amounts, e.g. making up as much as 1 part per trillion (0.0000000001%) of the carbon in the atmosphere.

Extra information:The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730±40 years. It decays into nitrogen-14 through beta decay.The activity of the modern radiocarbon standard is about 14 disintegrations per minute (dpm) per gram carbon.

Here's a video of carbon 14 dating, it is done by forensic detectives so you get a sneak peek into a forensic's detectives lab. However, the website does not allow me to embed the video into blogger so with regrets, i give you the link so click here.

This is another vieo about carbon 14 dating but it does not have anything to do with forensics scientists. Instead, this video is talking about carbon 14 dating.:

Anyway, the reason why carbon dating is so important and popular becasue it helps determines the age of certain archeological artifacts of a biological origin up to about 50,000 years old. It is used in dating things such as bone, cloth, wood and plant fibers that were created in the relatively recent past by human activities. This has helped many archaelogist and historians create break throughs in science, benefiting mankind and increasind our knowledge about things that have happened in the past.

How Carbon-14 is Made (refer to picture for simplified version :D)
Co­smic rays enter the earth's atmosphere in large numbers every day. For example, every person is hit by about half a million cosmic rays every hour. It is not uncommon for a cosmic ray to collide with an atom in the atmosphere, creating a secondary cosmic ray in the form of an energetic neutron, and for these energetic neutrons to collide with nitrogen atoms.

When the neutron collides, a nitrogen-14 (seven protons, seven neutrons) atom turns into a carbon-14 atom (six protons, eight neutrons) and a hydrogen atom (one proton, zero neutrons). Carbon-14 is radioactive, with a half-life of about 5,700 years.
­The carbon-14 atoms that cosmic rays create combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which plants absorb naturally and incorporate into plant fibers by photosynthesis. Animals and people eat plants and take in carbon-14 as well. The ratio of normal carbon (carbon-12) to carbon-14 in the air and in all living things at any given time is nearly constant.

Maybe one in a trillion carbon atoms are carbon-14. The carbon-14 atoms are always decaying, but they are being replaced by new carbon-14 atoms at a constant rate. At this moment, your body has a certain percentage of carbon-14 atoms in it, and all living plants and animals have the same percentage.

2.Hydrogen

Normal hydrogen, or hydrogen-1, has one proton and no neutrons (because there is only one proton in the nucleus, there is no need for the binding effects of neutrons). There is another isotope, hydrogen-2 (also known as deuterium), that has one proton and one neutron. Deuterium is very rare in nature (making up about 0.015 percent of all hydrogen), and although it acts like hydrogen-1 (for example, you can make water out of it) it turns out it is different enough from hydrogen-1 in that it is toxic in high concentrations.
The deuterium isotope of hydrogen is stable. A third isotope, hydrogen-3 (also known as tritium), has one proton and two neutrons. It turns out this isotope is unstable. That is, if you have a container full of tritium and come back in a million years, you will find that it has all turned into helium-3 (two protons, one neutron), which is stable. The process by which it turns into helium is called radioactive decay.

Now, lets talk about deuterium.

Deuterium has primarily two uses, as a tracer in research and in thermonuclear fusion reactions.

A tracer is any atom or group of atoms whose participation in a physical, chemical, or biological reaction can be easily observed. Radioactive isotopes are perhaps the most familiar kind of tracer. They can be tracked in various types of changes because of the radiation they emit.

For more than four decades, scientists have been trying to develop a method for bringing under control the awesome fusion power of a hydrogen bomb for use in commercial power plants. One of the most promising approaches appears to be a process in which two deuterons are fused to make a proton and a triton (the nucleus of a hydrogen-3 isotope). The triton and another deuteron then fuse to produce a helium nucleus, with the release of very large amounts of energy. So far, the technical details for making this process a commercially viable source of energy have not been completely worked out.



In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, nuclear fusion is the process by which multiple atomic nuclei join together to form a single heavier nucleus. It is accompanied by the release or absorption of large quantities of energy. Large scale fusion processes, involving many atoms fusing at once, must occur in matter which is at very high densities.

Some suggested advantages of commercial fusion reactors as power producers are:

-An effectively inexhaustible supply of fuel—at essentially zero cost on an energy production scale;
-A fuel supply that is available from the oceans to all countries and therefore cannot be interrupted by other nations;
-No possibility of nuclear runaway;
-No chemical combustion products as effluents;
-No afterheat cooling problem in case of an accidental loss of coolant;
-No use of weapons grade nuclear materials; thus no possibility of diversion for purposes of blackmail or sabotage;
-Low amount of radioactive by-products with significantly shorter half-life relative to fission reactors

A thought-provoking and intriguing video about our future with nuclear fusion: