Word: berkeleys
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...samples of the sediment back to the U.S. and showed them to his father Luis, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist also at the University of California, who had the clay analyzed. To everybody's surprise, it turned out to be 30 times as rich in iridium as normal rocks. The Berkeley team knew of only a few places where such high concentrations of the rare element might occur: in the earth's core, perhaps 2,000 miles belowground; in extraterrestrial objects like asteroids (or their fragments, meteors) and comets; or in the cosmic dust drifting to earth from a nearby supernova...
...Alvarezes' staunchest critics has been William Clemens, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. After systematically sampling parts of the eastern Montana area, he declared that the layer of iridium and the bones of the last surviving dinosaur were too far apart to share any meaningful connection. Besides, he asked, why should the mammals have survived any Cretaceous catastrophe? Says he: "If you're going to have a nuclear winter killing off the dinosaurs, why didn't it kill off everything else...
...rejected the galactic carrousel notion was California's Muller, a scientist obsessed by periodicity. If a familiar cosmic mechanism could not account for the cyclic nature of extinctions, he decided, something completely different would have to do. During Christmas break in 1983, Muller and fellow Astronomers Marc Davis of Berkeley and Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton were brainstorming about stars and periodicity, when Muller noted that more than half the stars in the galaxy are thought to be binaries (pairs of stars that orbit a common center of gravity). Suppose the sun has a companion...
Offers of assistance have come from other quarters as well. Jordin Kare, a physicist with Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, has suggested that a 24-in. Schmidt telescope in Australia be used with a computer scanning system called the Star Cruncher to survey the Southern Hemisphere skies. If these approaches turn up a blank, Kare and Muller will launch a Star Cruncher search in the north. And at JPL, Astrophysicist Thomas Chester, chief of the I.R.A.S. data team, is sifting through recorded I.R.A.S. transmissions looking for Nemesis and other unusual objects. Although I.R.A.S. operated for only ten months in 1983 before dying...
Gorbachev has now made plain his wishes for change, but achieving it is another question. Says Gregory Grossman, a specialist in Soviet economics at the University of California, Berkeley: "A new wind tends to blow most strongly in the Kremlin. It loses two-thirds of its force for every kilometer it moves outside." Yet Gorbachev is already demonstrating his intention to move rapidly, speak out and do whatever else may be necessary to give Soviet citizens a more positive feeling about their leadership...