How bricks, a screwdriver, and a 'demon core' of radioactive material killed 2 Manhattan Project scientists

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image of Slotin using a screwdriver to hold open the spheres around the demon core
A recreation of the experiment shows how Louis Slotin used a screwdriver to hold open metallic half-spheres around the "demon core."

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Jerome Powell fielded a question about 'Barbie' and Taylor Swift in a snooze of a Fed meeting

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Powell Barbie
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and "Barbie" actor Margot Robbie.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images; Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.

The US military once detonated a nuclear bomb directly above the heads of 5 officers

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US military Private First Class Jack Wilson (left, fore) and Sergeant Glenn Poth (right, fore) look at the smoke plume of a nuclear detonation as part of Operation Tumbler-Snapper at the Nevada Proving Grounds, Nevada, early to mid 1952.
The five men weren't required — — to stand under the explosion, which, unlike the one pictured here, would have been in the air, about three miles up.

PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Chien-Shiung Wu, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, spent her career fighting for gender equality in science

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Chien-Shiung Wu
Chien-Shiung Wu in a laboratory at Columbia University in 1958.

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'Oppenheimer' leaves out the most terrifying, deadly risk of nuclear weapons because nobody knew about it until the 1980s

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J. Robert Oppenheimer,
J. Robert Oppenheimer on a visit to New York on November 17, 1945.

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What it was like to live at the Los Alamos lab site during the Manhattan Project

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Buildings around Ashley Pond at the Los Alamos Project Y Site in 1942
The Los Alamos Ranch School buildings in 1942, which became part of the Los Alamos Project Y site.

National Security Research Center

Long after Oppenheimer, the US is still paying benefits to people who were exposed to radiation from nuclear tests

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A billowing white mushroom cloud, mottled with orange, pushes through a layer of clouds during Operation Ivy, the first test of a hydrogen bomb, at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
A mushroom cloud produced by the first test of a hydrogen bomb during Operation Ivy at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

'Barbie' and 'Oppenheimer' were both inspired by books. Here are 16 titles to read if you want more after the double feature

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Collage of book covers related to the
Both "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" share an influence in literature.

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The beauty and terror of Oppenheimer's first-ever nuclear test explosion, in the words of those who witnessed it

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Trinity Test
The mushroom cloud of the first atomic explosion at Trinity Test Site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

AP Photo/File

Barbie and Oppenheimer's Box Office Is Proof Studios Need to Make a Fair Deal

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Barbie and Oppenheimer opened this weekend, and crossing theater aisles for both films was a cultural phenomenon; Barbenheimer.

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