Word: fermi
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...June 1934 a distinguished Italian audience, including King Vittorio Emanuele, was told that Professor Enrico Fermi, theoretical and experimental physicist of the University of Rome, had artificially created a chemical element heavier than uranium...
...Italy's brilliant Enrico Fermi produced tiny, short-lived quantities of ekarhenium and ekaosmium (Nos. 93 and 94) by bombarding uranium with neutrons. These new substances were entirely synthetic, however, like the many synthetic, artificially radioactive elements which physicists have brought to birth by similar bombardments (TIME...
...miles per second. When the neutron hits a nucleus it either bounces off, transforming the atom instantly into another element, or is captured, producing a swollen, unstable atom which spits out the awkward excess for seconds, hours, sometimes days in the form of radiation or particles. Dr. Fermi found that slow neutrons were more easily captured than fast ones, worked out the equation for the slowing effect of hydrogen nuclei. Since the hydrogen atom, having only one outside electron, consists almost entirely of nucleus, it is excellent for braking fast neutrons, and substances rich in hydrogen such as water, paraffin...
...Thus Dr. Fermi holding a ball of paraffin in his hand symbolizes a matter of immense importance to biology. Organic substances are rich in hydrogen. Professor Ernest Orlando Lawrence of the University of California, whose huge apparatus produces a beam of 10,000,000 neutrons a second, finds that on the white blood cells of rats neutrons exert ten times the destructive effect of X rays of equal intensity. As laid down last month in the American Journal of Roentgenology and Radium Therapy, the biologic neutron problems now confronting science are these...
...Enrico Fermi was born in Rome 34 years ago, studied at the University of Pisa, has taught and researched at the University of Rome since 1927. Short, wiry, dapper, cheerful, he is married, has a 5-year-old daughter, likes to ski, play tennis. Some years ago he perceived that when a nuclear impact knocks a neutron and a positron out of an electron, there is a mysterious disappearance of energy. He surmised that the excess energy rode away on a little particle which, now generally accepted as theoretically necessary, still eludes observation. It is because of Fermi that this...