Word: beryllium
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Only at rare intervals, though, did Explorer XVI collide with anything bigger than a microscopic bit of cosmic dust. There were 44 meteoroids that succeeded in penetrating a sheet of beryllium-copper one-thousandth of an inch thick, which is slightly thicker than household aluminum foil. The most powerful meteoroid encountered knocked a tiny hole in stainless steel three-thousandths of an inch thick. Metal as thick as the wall of a beer can went unpunctured. NASA's tentative conclusion is that the plentiful meteoroids are too small to do harm, and the dangerous ones...
...high-grade iron ore, some 35 billion tons at last count, and its rushing brown rivers could generate 15 million kw. of electricity, more than is now produced by the entire TVA system. Its miners already dig 90% of Brazil's iron ore, 95% of its bauxite, beryllium and mica, all of its graphite and nickel, most of its diamonds and gold. Its furnaces and factories lead the country in pig iron, steel and ferrous alloys, rank second in aluminum, cement and lime. And on its rolling farm lands, 16.5 million cattle and 8,500,000 hogs fatten...
Deep in a dial-studded cabinet on the Navy's test ship Compass Island lies a hollow sphere of beryllium no bigger than a baseball. It has no visible means of support, yet it spins at 30,000 r.p.m. Awed naval technicians call it a "star in a bottle," and they count on that man-made star to tell nuclear submarines exactly where they are, even after months of cruising in black ocean deeps...
Electrical Support. For all practical purposes Honeywell's ESG has no friction at all. The beryllium sphere that is its rotor is enclosed in a ceramic case lined with copper electrodes that do not quite touch the sphere's surface. The electrodes carry powerful electric charges so that each of them tugs at the sphere. Whenever the tug gets uneven, a quick and intricate electronic circuit adjusts the charges so that the beryllium ball remains precisely in the center of the cavity, supported by nothing but electrical force...
...team that laid out the momentous experiment was led by Columbia Professors Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, and helped by Brookhaven scientists in charge of the synchrotron. First step was to shoot the machine's high-energy protons at a beryllium target and produce an intense beam of pions-which decay rapidly into muons, neutrinos (perhaps the new type), and other nuclear odds and ends. After shooting across some 70 ft., this beam of mixed particles hit a shield of battleship armor 42 ft. thick that stopped everything but the neutrinos, which sailed on unheeding...