Word: fermi
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Last week Enrico Fermi had his picture taken holding a hollow globe of paraffin as big as a pumpkin, standing beside a piece of apparatus that looked like stovepipe put together with baling wire (see cut). Said Dr. Fermi: "The most obvious application of artificial radioactivity which can be foreseen is in the medicinal field. Radium, naturally radioactive, is used for the treatment of cancer. The completely new radioactive substances created in the laboratory should give medical men new tools, some of which may prove more efficient than radium...
...Curie-Joliots' first results in artificial radioactivity have been duplicated and extended in a half-dozen countries, especially by California's Lawrence and Italy's Fermi. Dr. Lawrence obtained 5,000,000-volt gamma rays from salt, evoked the possibility of injecting harmless but radioactivated salt compounds into the human body as a cancer remedy. Dr. Fermi has coaxed radiations of beta particles (fast electrons) from phosphorus, iron, silicon, aluminum, chlorine, vanadium. copper, arsenic, silver, tellurium, iodine, a dozen others...
...continued emission of positrons from boron, magnesium and aluminum by bombarding those elements with alpha particles (TIME, Feb. 12). Since then their results have been reproduced and extended in dozens of laboratories in a half-dozen countries, notably England, Italy, the U. S. Italy's Professor Enrico Fermi and his aids have coaxed radiations of beta particles (fast electrons) from phosphorus, iron, silicon, aluminum, chlorine, vanadium, copper, arsenic, silver, tellurium, iodine, chromium, barium, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, titanium, zirconium, zinc, strontium, antimony, selenium, bromine...
...elements Professor Fermi played with last spring was uranium. Uranium, discovered in 1789, is the mother stuff of radium, and the heaviest element on earth (twice as heavy as tin). Astronomers believe that elements heavier than uranium must exist in the interior of the sun. Geologists admit that perhaps near the core of the earth may be something heavier than uranium. But there certainly has been none anywhere near the earth's surface where man can lay his hands on it-until possibly last week...
...King of Italy and a group of Fascist physicists, one of Professor Fermi's admiring colleagues reported that, after wiping away a flood of electrons, he had smashed a batch of neutrons upon a piece of uranium which weighed 92 atomic units. For 13½ min., while it sputtered electrons, the uranium weighed 93 units. According to the Mendeleyeff Table it had no scientific business weighing more than uranium. During that period, reasoned Professor Fermi, the substance must have been not uranium, but hypothetical Element...