Word: gamma
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...food scientist, works for a company called Radiation Technology. Mosgofian is director of the National Coalition to Stop Food Irradiation. The two men are talking -- yelling, really -- about one of the most emotional health issues of the 1980s: the use of irradiation as a preservative. The mixing of gamma rays with edibles has set off a nuclear food-chain reaction, releasing high rhetoric, short tempers and mass uncertainty...
...slaughtered pork were added to the list in the 1980s. Last April the agency gave the go-ahead for irradiating fruits and vegetables, and a furor erupted. Despite the FDA's consent, the process until now has been used mainly to preserve herbs and spices. But last week gamma ray-treated fruit made its first U.S. appearance when Laurenzo's Farmer's Market in North Miami Beach began offering irradiated Puerto Rican mangoes. The FDA is now considering whether to extend approval to fish and poultry. Nineteen other countries have also endorsed irradiation for a wide array of foodstuffs...
...method, which like radiology was developed around the turn of the century, is simple: food passes through a lead-shielded concrete chamber where radioactive cobalt 60 or cesium 137 bombards it with gamma rays, killing insects and bacteria and sometimes slowing ripening. The food does not become radioactive. "There's nothing in common at all between a nuclear reactor like Chernobyl and an irradiator," says Karl Abraham, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). "It's like comparing bananas to tigers." Treated food "can be immediately eaten," says George Giddings, director of food irradiation at Isomedix...
...meteor were to burst in the atmosphere tomorrow, Shoemaker says, "the Soviets and the U.S. would know what it was" and not react militarily. Their detectors could distinguish between a nuclear explosion, which generates million-degree temperatures, X rays and gamma rays, and an exploding meteor, which would produce considerably lower temperatures and no deadly radiation. But smaller nations, unaware of the nature of the blast, might react violently. Says Shoemaker: "Suppose it happens over Syria or Pakistan?" He proposes that the U.S. immediately try to determine whether the explosion was of cosmic origin and notify the affected nation...
Rapid rotation of star causes a tremendous in crease in the ultraviolet light. X-rays, and gamma radiation it the Sun rotated rapidly in its south, this excess radiation may have had important effects on the youthful Earth's atmosphere...