Word: fischbach
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...same time. He thus convinced the world--and in the years to come, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as well--that in a vacuum all objects, regardless of mass, fall at the same speed. Galileo's work went unchallenged until last week, when Purdue University Physics Professor Ephraim Fischbach, three of his graduate students and S.H. Aronson, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, reported discerning a previously unknown force that causes objects of different masses to fall at different rates...
...Fischbach is proved right, his hypothetical force, which he calls hypercharge, would be the fifth known basic force. (Four forces are known to exist: gravity; electromagnetism; the strong force, which binds the atomic nucleus; and the weak force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactivity.) Hypercharge, Fischbach reports in Physical Review Letters, is an extremely weak repulsive force that acts between objects no more than about 600 feet apart and varies in strength from element to element. It is strongest in iron and weakest in hydrogen. Thus, the physicists contend, if an iron ball and, say, a feather were...
...team began looking for evidence of hypercharge after perceiving what Fischbach calls "funny results" in two contemporary experiments, one involving gravity tests in a deep mine, the other the behavior of subatomic particles. "We felt the results could be explained with an additional force," says Fischbach, "so we went back to the data published by Baron Roland von Eötvös in Hungary in 1922 to see if we could find evidence." Eötvös had indirectly measured the speeds at which objects fall and found small discrepancies, which he attributed to limitations in his equipment. Re-examining the data...
DIED. Charlotte Aldegonde Elisabeth Marie Wilhelmine, 89, beloved Grand Duchess and constitutional ruler of Luxembourg from 1919 until 1964, when she abdicated in favor of her son Grand Duke Jean, the present head of state; at Fischbach Castle near Luxembourg City. Chosen in a special post-World War I plebiscite to replace her German-leaning older sister, she tended to her largely ceremonial duties with intelligence, charm and a lack of pomp. During World War II, her radio broadcasts from exile in Great Britain did much to build morale. Afterward, she helped guide her tiny principality...
...even proponents agree that fetal cells alone won't eradicate Parkinson's--if only because there aren't nearly enough fetuses to do the job. Scientists are looking instead to stem cells, unspecialized cells that eventually turn into every tissue in the body. "That," says Dr. Gerald Fischbach, former head of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, "could be a renewable resource." Unfortunately, stem cells are most easily harvested from human embryos, and that means the controversy underlying the Parkinson's surgery isn't about to go away...