Word: gamma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When spaceships start using nuclear power, they will have to take off from deserts with no unsheltered humans for miles around. Only the crewmen in their cabins will be fully shielded. As the ship departs for space it will blast a considerable area with gamma rays, neutrons and radioactive exhaust, and a new, unpoisoned site may have to be found for the next takeoff. But designers of nuclear rockets do not worry much about this sort of thing. In Nucleonics, a group of experts tell about current projects to soar into space by atom power...
...illness, but at other times attack the nervous system. Doctors used to think that the only one of the three capable of causing paralysis was the virus of polio itself. This may not be so, say Hammon and colleagues. After studying six patients who were immunized against polio with gamma globulin in prevaccine days and then developed a paralytic disease that was mistaken for polio, they now suggest that the guilty viruses were of the Coxsackie group (named for the Hudson Valley town where the first one was isolated) or the ECHO group (named for enteric cytopathogenic human orphan). Concludes...
Physicist Wyatt suggests another search at the site for short-lived radioisotopes, produced by intense gamma radiation, which could prove the point. One theoretical flaw in the argument is that an antimatter meteor ought to explode shortly after whizzing into the earth's atmosphere. Moreover, anti-gravity may be a property of antimatter. Unlike other meteors, which fall into the earth's gravitational field, an antimatter meteor would be repelled. But if antimatter does not have antigravity, an antimatter meteor - if big enough to survive the annihilation of its surface - might hit the earth...
...Harwell. The scientists put 24 grams of sodium carbonate in a reactor and exposed it to neutrons until it became fiercely radioactive. They took it to Stonehenge by truck, put it in a rabbit-size burrow under the great stone and left it there for 36 hours while its gamma rays felt for cracks. If the cracks were really serious, they would show on photographic films placed on top of the stone...
...infected adenoids that threatened to block a Eustachian tube. Such blockage could, in turn, cause infection of the middle ear. A fortnight ago Joke (pronounced Yo-ka) went to Utrecht's City and Academic Hospital, 25 miles away. Doctors decided to destroy the diseased, swollen tissue with powerful gamma rays from a radium "needle"-actually a blunt metal capsule, 20 mm. by 3 mm., on a long, flexible shaft. One doctor pushed this up Joke's nose until it curved down into the nasopharynx. After eight minutes, he took the gadget out, put it in its case...