At a particle accelerator in Caen, France, an international team of physicists has done in two weeks what once would have taken years: mapped the gamma-ray emissions of more than a dozen unstable heavy nuclei simultaneously, born from the splitting of curium atoms. The work, led by researchers from Krakow, offers a new window into one of nuclear physics' persistent mysteries — why fission produces more high-energy radiation than theory expects. The answer may lie in pygmy resonances, the subtle collective trembling of neutrons at the edges of heavy nuclei, a phenomenon as delicate in name as i