Word: brookhaven
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Enter the radioisotope "cow." A simple device first developed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, it takes advantage of the fact that many long-lived radioactive substances can produce short-lived radioactive offspring. The cow consists of an open-ended test tube with various layers of alumina and specially treated glass through which the parent substance is filtered. In the case of a parent such as molybdenum-99 (half-life: 2.8 days), technetium-99m (half-life: 6 hours) is produced, and it accumulates at the bottom of the tube (the cow's udder). The milked technetium can therefore be created...
...site of a $375 million AEC atom-smashing accelerator and so gain 2,000 new jobs, 10,000 new residents and a $16 million-a-year payroll. Haverhill, one among 148 locations considered by AEC, is no longer in the running, but six other communities, from Sacramento, Calif., to Brookhaven, N.Y., are still battling for that plum with offers of free land, improved schools, and even tax-subsidized power expansion. Their skirmishing is part of an increasingly competitive struggle among states and cities for new factories...
...called pions-one positive, one negative, one without any electrical charge. According to the laws of symmetry, the positive and negative pions should have identical energies. But when a team led by Columbia University's Dr. Paolo Franzini examined 1,441 photographs of eta-meson decay in the Brookhaven bubble chamber (TIME, July 8), they found that in 53% of the photographs the positive pion apparently had more energy than its negative counterpart-a significant violation of symmetry...
Because the Brookhaven bubble chamber has a fixed magnetic field, the positive pions that Franzini studied always curved in one direction, while the negative pions went the other way. If the field had been uneven for any reason, the higher positive-pion energy levels detected at Brookhaven might well have been erroneous. In the CERN spark chamber, the magnetic field was periodically reversed to make sure that positive and negative pions would both be subject to any variations in the field...
Though most scientists at the Berkeley meeting privately sided with the CERN findings, none would state flatly that symmetry had, after all, been restored. Franzini's group is preparing a new round of experiments at Brookhaven in an attempt to confirm the violations they reported; still another team led by Columbia University Physicist Leon Lederman will attempt a similar experiment, and the CERN scientists plan to make more tests of their own. "The evidence from the CERN experiments is by no means conclusive," says Franzini defiantly. "Many more experiments are needed before we can say who is right...