First developed in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby, the technique is based on the decay of the carbon-14 isotope. Radiocarbon dating has been used for historical studies ...

In 1940 Martin Kamen discovered radioactive carbon-14 (an isotope of carbon) and found that it had a half-life of about 5,700 years. Scientists had also found that some of the nitrogen in the ...

Isotopes are forms of an element that have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons. There are three isotopes of hydrogen: hydrogen, deuterium (hydrogen-2) and tritium ...