Word: electrons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...until 1933 that a virus was identified as the cause of flu and dubbed influenza A. In 1946-47 another form of A emerged, and about this time virologists working with electron microscopes made an important discovery. They found that the outer coat of each virus particle is studded with hundreds of protein spikes. There are two types: hemagglutinin, a biochemical glue that makes red cells clump together and helps the virus get into cells, and an enzyme called neuraminidase that dissolves the glue and helps the virus get out of cells. These spikes are also the antigenic proteins that...
What has hit the Soviet Union is a microbe that is invisible except to devices like the electron-microscope eye: an influenza virus. It appears to have surfaced first hi Khabarovsk, on the border between Soviet Siberia and Chinese Manchuria. (Soviet sources suggested that it might have originated in Southeast Asia as it has appeared in Hong Kong.) For obscure reasons, the Siberia-Manchuria border and nearby areas are suspected of having been the spawning ground of almost all, if not all, epidemic-causing influenza viruses. This region has been indicted as the birthplace of the notorious A-2 strain...
What triggers the bolt, says Follin, are particles in the secondary cosmic showers called muons, which increase the charge with fresh electron avalanches. Finally, electrons burst from the cloud along a path of ionized (electrically charged) air. As other muons intercept the path at different angles, forming new trails, the electrons follow a jagged, steplike route to the ground...
Magnified 615 times with the scanning electron microscope, the body of a carpenter bee resembles a forest in a nightmare. At 13,818 times, a crack in an eggshell is a mysterious view of a devastating earthquake. In Magnifications (Schocken; 119 pages; $24.95), Photographer David Scharf takes the reader on a visual adventure into microspace. The images are beyond normal senses, but through the microscope Scharf puts the reader eyeball to eyeball with tiny insects like the Feathery Midge (in life about 2 mm. long) and allows us to make contact with beautiful, intriguing, minute parts of plants and minerals...
Other groups of scientists are placing their bets on a different technique: "inertial confinement." This process involves the high-power laser or electron-beam bombardment of tiny pellets crammed with deuterium and tritium. The sudden application of the energetic beams causes instant vaporization, or boiling away, of the outer surface of the sphere. As the pellet coating flies outward, it pushes back against the deuterium and tritium, compressing and heating the mixture. If the impinging beams are energetic enough, the effect will be so great that the nuclei will fuse, releasing energy like a miniature H-bomb. Among others, researchers...