- IN April 1945, in the fastness of the Führerbunker in the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Goebbels read aloud to Hitler from the latter’s favorite book, Carlyle’s Frederick the Great. What he read were those pages dealing with the desperate and, apparently, hopeless posture of the Prussian king toward the end of the even Years’ War, just before the sudden and unexpected death of the Czarina Elizabeth which resulted in the elimination of Russia from the alliance against Frederick, and thus his seemingly miraculous salvation. Goebbels reported that “tears stood in the Führer’s eyes” during this reading. When Franklin D. Roosevelt died, a few days later, Hitler thought that another, similar miracle was about to occur. But the analogy proved to be inexact. By the end of April both Hitler and Goebbels were dead, and the thousand-year Reich had collapsed.
- Polonium (Wikipedia)
Polonium is a chemical element; it has symbol Po and atomic number 84. A rare and highly radioactive metal (although sometimes classified as a metalloid) with no stable isotopes, polonium is a chalcogen and chemically similar to selenium and tellurium, though its metallic character resembles that of its horizontal neighbors in the periodic table: thallium, lead, and bismuth. Due to the short half-life of all its isotopes, its natural occurrence is limited to tiny traces of the fleeting polonium-210 (with a half-life of 138 days) in uranium ores, as it is the penultimate daughter of natural uranium-238. Though longer-lived isotopes exist, such as the 124 years half-life of polonium-209, they are much more difficult to produce. Today, polonium is usually produced in milligram quantities by the neutron irradiation of bismuth. Due to its intense radioactivity, which results in the radiolysis of chemical bonds and radioactive self-heating, its chemistry has mostly been investigated on the trace scale only.