CAMS
11/18/202517 min
Ancient footprints, unidentified remains, brain cells - they're all part of the story told through atoms, and at the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, those atoms speak volumes.
In this episode, we explore how Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) is helping scientists solve mysteries across time: from rewriting the timeline of human arrival in North America to closing decades-old cold cases, and even advancing biomedical breakthroughs.
With insights from CAMS researchers, we follow the journey of rare isotopes as they become time-stamps, and vital clues, challenging our understanding of the...
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 0· Host0:04
British Columbia, 1968. Detectives were at a loss.
Bruce Buchholz· Guest0:09
Come in, dispatch. I think we've found something.
Speaker 0· Host0:11
A child's remains were discovered along the riverbank with no clear cause of death and no indication of who the child was.
Bruce Buchholz· Guest0:19
Copy that, dispatch. Alert central. We have a possible 10-6-4. They couldn't figure out where the child was from.
Speaker 0· Host0:24
Initial forensics at the time concluded that they had found the body of a seven to nine-year-old.
Bruce Buchholz· Guest0:29
And there wasn't anybody in the area that matched, that there was no DNA at that time.
Speaker 0· Host0:35
With no name, no missing persons match, and no DNA analysis available, the case faded into the archives of the John and Jane Does, stories suspended in silence. Years passed, but in 2005, a forensic DNA analysis at Simon Fraser University reopened the case with a new discovery.
Bruce Buchholz· Guest0:58
They misidentified the age.
Speaker 0· Host1:02
The child wasn't even seven years old. He was about four and a half. Hundreds of miles away, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the next step. With an advanced radiocarbon dating technique, scientists used the atomic signature of Cold War nuclear tests to pinpoint when the child was born and when he died, key information that led to the end of the search and a legal