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Aside from being the name of the local minor-league baseball team in The Simpsons, isotopes are, well, they're, um-okay, we're not sure. But that won't stop us from giving you an answer¿ For this scavenger hunt, we used the age-old strategy of "search-browse-click-read-repeat." Our first stop was our own Isotopes category (under Business to Business > Scientific > Chemistry), which lead us to believe that isotopes had something to do with basic chemical elements. A few dozen links later, we'd stumbled onto The Glossary of Nuclear Science Terms. Surely they'd have an explanation of
isotopes. Lo and behold, here's what we found: Two or more nuclides having the same atomic number, thus constituting the same element, but differing in the mass number. Isotopes of a given element have the same number of nuclear protons but differing numbers of neutrons. Of course! How could we have not known that. Not satisfied with this mumbo-jumbolated answer, we went searching for more. By studying our "isotopes" search-result page and looking at the URLs of the hits, we found an entry for Enchanted Learning Software, which sounded like it might be more appropriate for our age level. We clicked on their Sharks Glossary and there we read: An
isotope of an element is another form of the same element that has a different number of neutrons in the nucleus (giving it a different atomic weight). Plus, the definition was illustrated by a drawing of electrons zooming around the nucleus of an atom, and that made things a lot clearer¿
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