Microbead reveals a new alloy forged by the Hiroshima blast
A grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay contains a microscopic glass bead called hiroshimaite that traps a previously unrecorded multicomponent alloy—an almost uniform mix of iron, chromium, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, silicon, and aluminum—frozen in an ordered structure by the blast’s rapid cooling, a nonequilibrium phase formed in the atomic fireball.