Word: alpha
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...Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment, which has equipment beyond the reach of any hospital. There, experts discovered Litvinenko's urine was teeming with radiation--not the gamma rays they had been looking for, which are the usual culprits in radiation poisoning because they can penetrate steel and concrete, but alpha particles, which can be blocked by a single sheet of paper or a layer of human skin. If they get into your bloodstream, though, alpha particles will destroy everything they touch. The Chernobyl occurs inside. This is not a nice...
...Litvinenko's fate. On Nov. 23, a few hours after the scientists isolated what was causing his body to disintegrate, he succumbed. His was not the quiet, inexplicable demise that a poisoner usually seeks. Instead, those alpha particles, which were shown to come from the rare isotope polonium 210, opened a box of mysteries that have grabbed the world's attention for weeks and turned a gruesome death into the center of a global manhunt and a potential row between Russia and the rest of the world...
Litvinenko got sick the evening of Nov. 1, when alpha particles were destroying the lining of his gut. As he began to suspect poison, he focused on two meetings he had earlier that day. One was at a sushi bar in central London with Mario Scaramella, 36, an Italian lawyer and, like Litvinenko, a man drawn to the world of secret information and conspiracy theories. The second meeting was in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel, near the U.S. embassy, with a group of Russian businessmen with whom Litvinenko was apparently hatching business ventures in Britain. "Alexander said both...
...concentrator in Winthrop House. “It was the lowest grade I’d ever gotten in my whole life, but it really motivated me.” Meyer was among the 48 seniors notified of their election into the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the Alpha Iota of Massachusetts, last week. Nine of the honored students were economics concentrators—more than twice the number of inductees from any other concentration. And in a departure from most of the chapter’s 225-year, male-dominated history, the group selected this fall is balanced...
Three and a half years ago, as the U.S. prepared for war with Iraq, Condoleezza Rice went to President Bush with a complaint: Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't return her calls. At the time, Rumsfeld was the Administration's swaggering alpha male, a global celebrity whom even Bush called a "matinee idol"; Rice was the overwhelmed National Security Adviser, struggling to make herself heard above the din of colliding war-cabinet egos. "I know you won't talk to Condi," Bush told Rumsfeld, according to Bob Woodward's book State of Denial. "But you've got to talk...