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Home > News > Lost and found

Lost and found

Spring 2015 issue
May 1, 2015
This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Spring 2015
  • In this issue

    Features

    In the domain of design

    Jacobs Hall: New home for design innovation

    Design case studies

    Dean’s Word

    Upfront

    • Simplify: The RISC story
    • Seismic song
    • Fostering disruptive technologies
    • Lost and found

    Breakthroughs

    • For clean water
    • The graphene switch
    • The many frontiers of synthetic biology

    Alumni notes

    • Farewell

    Download this issue

  • Past issues

During the tranquil winter break, news broke of an interesting campus discovery, or re-discovery. Locked in a windowless closet in the university’s hazardous materials storage area was a fleck of early plutonium developed through the Manhattan Project. The late Berkeley chemist Glenn Seaborg and a team of scientists were the first to figure out how to synthesize plutonium, for which Seaborg was awarded the 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry. “This is the first sample of plutonium large enough to be weighed and its mass determined,” says professor of nuclear engineering Eric Norman, who led the analysis verifying the find.

Topics: Nuclear engineering
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