Here are two seemingly unrelated facts. One: from the late 1940s through 1963, we tested atomic bombs in the atmosphere. Two: wine lovers are sometimes duped into spending exorbitant amounts for fake vintage bottles that weren’t from the year they were supposedly grown.
But Graham Jones at Australia’s University of Adelaide thought he could use bomb information against counterfeit wines. [He talked about his research at the meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco.] Carbon dating works by comparing the amount of carbon-14, which is a less common and less stable form of carbon, to the more abundant carbon-12.