This one story might remind you of the movie 'Captain America: The First Avenger' where there is a Nazi-analog organization trying to harness the power of mysterious glowing cubes to make weapons of mass destruction. Then the plan failed as it was sabotaged by the Allied Forces and their cube ended up in a secret US research facility.
In fact, it turns out that the story in the film can be said to be similar to events in the real world. Only, it wasn't the 'Tesseract Infinity Stone', but rather a uranium cube.
Several new nuclear forensic studies were carried out by a team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to find out more about this.
"This is not only a very fun science project and a series of scientific experiments, but also a historical project," explained PNNL researcher Brittany Robertson, who presented the results at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.
"We're looking at disparate information and archived information and even letters written between scientists, to try to figure out what we can measure and how we can actually make some interpretations."
From the early 1940s, the Nazis and the US raced to find nuclear technology. The US had the Manhattan Project and the Nazis had Werner Heisenberg.
Fortunately, the alleged Nazi program was foiled before it was carried out, and the Allies confiscated many of the uranium cubes after the war. But their fate after that was pretty grim: about 600 were shipped to the US, but only about 12 are known today, with the remainder being used in US nuclear projects, sold to private collectors and research institutes, or simply lost.
"I'm glad the Nazi program wasn't as sophisticated as they wanted it to be at the end of the war, because otherwise the world would be a very different place," Robertson said.
The origin of the cube in PNNL is unknown or is still a mystery. This was said by lead researcher Jon Schwantes.
"We don't know for sure that the cube is from a German program, so first we want to uncover it," Schwantes said.
"Then we wanted to compare the different cubes to see if we could classify them according to the particular research group [Heisenberg or Diebner] who created them," he continued.
Anecdotally, the cube in PNNL is a Heisenberg cube, but the research team has no actual measurements to back up the claim.
To prove the origin of the cube, he turned to radiochronometry, a technique that dates radioactive material by measuring how much it has decayed. Research was also carried out on the coating used to protect the cube.
"We wanted to know if this particular cube was the one associated with the two research programmes," said Schwantes.
"Also, this is an opportunity for us to test our science before we apply it in an actual nuclear forensic investigation." This is as written by IFL Science.
