On the morning of 6 August 1945, in Hiroshima, Japan, a flash of light enveloped the sky so brightly that a 13-year-old boy, Oiwa Kohei, thought the Sun had fallen to Earth and landed in his mother's flower beds.
In March, some 1,900 members of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published an open letter, declaring: "We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation's scientific enterprise is being decimated."
"Industry was looking for scientific information to make sure their processes were safe," Martin said. "So, led by Diel's lab, we started a series of studies driven by the fact that industry needed these answers."