It has been come to my attention that recently, Vietnam scientist have found some “3,000-year-old rice grains”. And some of these rice grains have sprouted well.

I am so surprised with this news and wondering that it is true or not! I hope that it is not just another “science trick”. If this discovery is true, it should be one of the greatest discovery of the year 2010.

Now the bottom line is that how we will determine the age of these “3,000-year-old-rice grains”?

After asked Mr. Google, I see this one, a usable method for determining the age of stuff in archeology

Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) differs from other forms of mass spectrometry in that it accelerates ions to extraordinarily high kinetic energies before mass analysis. The special strength of AMS among the mass spectrometric methods is its power to separate a rare isotope from an abundant neighboring mass (“abundance sensitivity”, e.g. ¹⁴C from ¹²C).^[1] The method suppresses molecular isobars completely and in many cases can separate atomic isobars (e.g. ¹⁴N from ¹⁴C) also. This makes possible the detection of naturally occurring, long-lived radio-isotopes such as ¹⁰Be, ³⁶Cl, ²⁶Al and ¹⁴C. Their typical isotopic abundance ranges from 10^-12 to 10^-18. AMS can outperform the competing technique of decay counting for all isotopes where the half life is long enough.^[2]

Applications of AMS

The applications are many. AMS is most often employed to determine the concentration of ¹⁴C, e.g. by. Archaeologists for radiocarbon dating. An accelerator mass spectrometer is required, over other forms of mass spectrometry, because of their insufficient abundance sensitivity, and to resolve stable nitrogen-14 from radiocarbon. Due to the long half-life of ¹⁴C, decay counting requires significantly larger samples. ¹⁰Be, ²⁶Al, and ³⁶Cl are used for surface exposure dating in geology. ³H, ¹⁴C, ³⁶Cl, and ¹²⁹I are used as hydrological tracer.

Accelerator mass spectrometry is widely used in biomedical research.^[5][6][7]. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Currently, there are about 180 AMS facilities in the world (Wikipedia) – and there is no one in Vietnam

So now just hope that is true and wait for the analytic results coming from a foreign AMS facility.