Word: atomically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...curved surfaces feature no protruding stabilizers, almost no sharp corners or bends; its dark gray-and-black skin and skeleton consist of layers of graphite epoxies and ceramics honed to extremely fine tolerances. Virtually invisible to radar, it has been called the greatest achievement in military technology since the atom bomb. With the advent of the B-2 Stealth bomber, the U.S. could be on its way to maintaining military dominance well into the next century. Yet the B-2 is an enormously expensive aircraft with a dubious mission. It may pose more of a threat to the U.S. budget...
Charges of political favoritism began to fly almost as soon as Energy Secretary John Herrington announced that Texas had won the competition for the $4.4 billion superconducting supercollider (SSC), designed to be the world's ! largest and most powerful atom smasher. Led by Arizona's Dennis DeConcini, Senators from several also-ran states protested to President Reagan that "there is a widespread perception that this decision was based . . . on political and other factors." They called for an investigation by both the General Accounting Office and a commission of "nationally respected physicists." Other legislators issued similar complaints...
...chemistry prize. So when Robert Huber, the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry near Munich, received his telephone call from Sweden, the champagne was readily at hand. Huber, 51, and fellow West Germans Johann Deisenhofer, 45, and Hartmut Michel, 40, were recognized for revealing the "atom by atom" structure of the molecule at the heart of photosynthesis, the process by which sunlight is converted into the chemical energy that fuels plant and animal life...
...most stimulating parts of the book are those that deal directly with elementary-particle theory and its historical development. The history of nuclear physics in the 20th century begins in 1911 when Ernest Rutherford disproved, through relatively simple experiments, the dominant scientific theories which viewed the atom as a "large, soft and spongy pudding with electrons embedded in it." Rutherford concluded instead that there was a hard and heavy center to the atom, around which electrons orbit...
This discovery eventually led to the simple model of the atom which is still taught in high school physics courses: the nucleus consists of positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, around which negatively charged electrons orbit. Yet the continuous discovery of new particles, such as the unstable muon, challenged this simple theory. In addition, this theory raised further theoretical questions: how was the nucleus held together? Why did radioactive decay exist...