We have the pleasure of hearing from John Friedman, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at UWM, about the formation of the elements.

We are stardust: Nearly every particle of which we are made once belonged to a star.

The fusion of lighter elements to form heavier ones in living stars was long thought to account for the heavy nuclei, but over the last decades, that simple plot has thickened: Compelling evidence implicates both the death throes of massive stars and collisions of long-dead stars -- neutron stars -- in the birth of heavy elements.