"Wet documents, moldy paper, insect and vermin residue, and other unpleasant things"

Radioactive lab notebooks! (Courtesy of Brent, who got it here.)

At schools like Princeton and Columbia, one is really on the spot for this Manhattan Project history, it's pretty amazing. I would love to go sometime and see the sites in New Mexico. My friend N. (I may have this story slightly wrong!) was subletting an apartment down the street from the widow of this physicist, for instance, and one day archivists turned up to plumb the apartment's contents for the papers of Kitty Oppenheimer...

Yesterday I sent out the manuscript of my own novel of adventures in radioisotope research, set in an alternate-universe version of Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics (a.k.a. the sequel to The Explosionist). I'll do one more pass through the manuscript in September, and of course then there will be copy-editing and proofing - but still, it's huge to be done. New provisional title, already announced on Facebook: Invisible Things!