Origin of the anomalous long lifetime of 14C
  We report the microscopic origins of the anomalously suppressed beta decay of 14C to 14N using the ab initio no-core shell model (NCSM) with the Hamiltonian from chiral effective field theory (EFT) including three-nucleon force (3NF) terms. The 3NF induces unexpectedly large cancellations within the p-shell between contributions to beta decay, which reduce the traditionally large contributions from the NN interactions by an order of magnitude, leading to the long lifetime of 14C. 
P. Maris, J. P. Vary, P. Navratil, W. E. Ormand, H. Nam and D. J. Dean
nucl-th