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A database and an application, known as “NUCLEIDE”, have been developed with the aim of offering users easy access to nuclear and atomic decay data simply by clicking on buttons. The aim of this table is to provide recommended data for nuclides of special interest for metrology or practical applications, such as nuclear medicine, monitoring and reactor shielding, etc. Primary recommended data comprise half-lives, decay modes, branching fractions and their uncertainties and the energies and emission intensities for X-and gamma-rays, electron emissions and alpha particles. In order to update the data and regularly add new evaluations, a new international collaboration has been formed, the Decay Data Evaluation Project (DDEP), comprising evaluators from Prance, Russia, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and the United States. Its objective is to provide carefully recommended values which may eventually become standard data. The results of this work are available on CD-ROM or in print.

The possibility of using the video superimposition technique for the identification of a skull by comparing it with photographs of missing persons is founded on the fact that the human skull, unlike any other part of the human skeleton, shows unmistakable individual characteristics. In order to obtain a quantification, the individuality of human skulls is defined in terms of craniometric data and their probability distribution. First calculations based on the coordinates of some important encephalometric points of 52 European skulls suggest individualities comparable to those of fingerprints. Under certain conditions the video superimposition technique can establish very strong evidence for the identity of an unknown skull, provided that it is applied correctly and carefully.