Word: gamma
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...Bureau mounts its diamonds (which must be more colorless and flawless than good grade jewelry stones) between two small brass contacts. One contact is charged with 1,000 volts of electricity. When an alpha, beta or gamma ray hits the diamond, it knocks an electron off one of the carbon atoms of which the diamond is composed. Propelled by the pressure of the 1,000 volts, the electron darts along one of the straight channels which run between the atoms of a diamond crystal. This motion sets up an electrical pulsation that can be detected easily by various standard instruments...
...facts: because Earle had complained of radiation sickness, the doctor had borrowed an old Geiger counter from Texas Christian University and reported that Earle's body was emitting "gamma rays." But the doctor found that Earle's death was due not to radiation but to acute hepatitis (inflammation of the liver...
...Commission, which have kept a close watch on employees, are morally certain that there have been only two deaths from radioactivity in the history of the project: those of Physicists Louis A. Slotin and Harry K. Daghlian, who died from accidental exposure to a powerful beam of neutrons and gamma rays last year (TIME, June...
Most of the scars seemed to result from the patients' burns, but there were puzzling exceptions: when a skin graft was taken from an unburned part of a patient's body, a keloid often developed there too. Could the victims' exposure to fission products-neutrons, gamma" rays, etc.-have something to do with it? The doctors did not know for certain, but they suspected that keloids might be ugly forerunners of cancer...
...would be far better (and cheaper) to get electricity direct. How? Piles give their energy in a snarl of assorted forms: zig-zagging neutrons, high-speed beta particles, heat, light, gamma rays. Confined within the pile's thick shield, they all simmer down to heat, the most "degraded" form of energy. It takes the costly boiler-turbine-generator combination to "elevate" the heat into usable electricity...