Einstein's formula reveals the energy in nuclear reactions that convert matter into pure energy--something physically impossible with chemical reactions.

FORBES: Yellowcake Fever

Sterile neutrinos differ from ordinary neutrinos (electrically neutral particles produced in abundance by the nuclear reactions that power the sun) because ordinary neutrinos feel the weak nuclear force, while sterile ones do not.

ECONOMIST: Research from the beginning of time

One explanation for the solar-neutrino deficit (only a third of the predicted number have been detected) is that electron-neutrinos produced by nuclear-fusion reactions in the sun's core mutate into the other two types, which are harder to detect.

ECONOMIST: The news that neutrinos have mass is both good and bad

About 2 billion years ago, uranium rocks at a site in Oklo, Gabon, experienced such compression that they underwent fission reactions much like those that occur in nuclear reactors.

ECONOMIST: Fundamental physics

At that stage in the universe's evolution, no nuclear reactions were going on, so nothing much was happening that might have generated any light (or, more relevantly, any radio waves).

ECONOMIST: Radio telescopes

Equally importantly, the Higgs allows two of the four forces in nature -- the electromagnetic force and the weak force, which is responsible for most nuclear reactions -- to be unified and described by mathematics of the same type that describe the other two known forces, the so-called strong force and gravity.

CNN: Higgs and the holy grail of physics

Modular nuclear reactors take uranium, or in some cases thorium, and produce steam for turbines via heat generated in fission reactions.

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