Word: billionths
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...enough antiprotons were created to make collisions likely. Sensitive detectors had to be devised that could spot a single boson. (In a typical run, the scientists figured that they would get just one boson in a billion collisions. It would also be extremely shortlived, vanishing in less than a billionth of a billionth of a second.) When the CERN machine went back on line last fall, reaching energies of more than 540 billion electron volts, Rubbia's team identified at least five collisions that indicated the presence of both W+s and W¯s. They did not, however...
...entirely new universe, aided by technology only vaguely dreamed of in Einstein's day: giant radio antennas that can "see" hitherto unknown sources of energy in space, orbiting satellites that scan the heavens high above the obscuring atmosphere, and atomic clocks so accurate they lose or gain barely a billionth of a second in a month...
...size, cost and electrical drain of any equipment in which they were used. One immediate byproduct: a new generation of small, desk-size minicomputers as well as larger, high-speed machines. Their speed resided in the rate at which electric current races through wire: about one foot per billionth of a second, close to the velocity of light. Even so, an electrical pulse required a significant fraction of a second to move through the miles of wiring in the early, large computers. Now even circuitous routes through IC chips could be measured in inches-and traversed by signals...
Because the corona is only one-billionth as bright as the sun's visible disc, scientists have been able to observe only a very limited portion of the corona when the sun is not eclipsed. An extensive observation of the corona has occurred just once, during the 1970 total solar eclipse, by an expedition force led by Donald H. Menzel, former director of the Harvard Observatory...
...mushrooms (which they often architecturally resemble). For every dollar spent on food eaten away from home, an estimated 40? goes to fast-food emporiums. The total sales this year are expected to reach $20 billion. McDonald's, the giant of the industry, will very soon sell its 23 billionth hamburger. A Texas chain called Church's Fried Chicken uses up 37 million pickled jalapenos per year. In 1976 the 700-plus units of Taco Bell consumed 1 million tons of beef-and that is a modest amount by the standards of McDonald's or Burger King...