Word: gammas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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MEAT ZAPPER Dangerous bacteria like E. coli and Salmonella could be zapped in meat and poultry, but the public has balked at irradiation in foods--even though it's government approved--because it involves powerful gamma rays emitted by radioactive isotopes. Now Titan Corp. in San Diego, Calif., has invented a meat pasteurization system that uses electron beams instead. Approved by the FDA and awaiting final regulations from the USDA, electronically pasteurized meat should be in selected test markets by year...
...September 1997, the Boston City Licensing Board shut down MIT's Phi Gamma Delta fraternity after first-year pledge Scott Kreuger died from alcohol poisoning at one of the fraternity's parties. Every since, the news media has given MIT fraternity antics national attention. That attention is currently being lavished on a recent rash of stupidly self-destructive stunts...
Thirty years ago, military satellites first noticed flashbulb-like gamma bursts going off throughout the cosmos. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, opened in 1991, discovered that the bursts were surprisingly common--300 or so occur each year--and remarkably distant. "They are more than halfway to the edge of the visible universe," says NASA astrophysicist Neil Gehrels...
...When ordinary stars burn out, they may become neutron stars, dense bodies with gravity fields so powerful that a marshmallow falling into one would release as much energy as a thousand hydrogen bombs. If two of these bodies began orbiting each other, they would ultimately collide, leading to titanic gamma-ray blasts. Other researchers believe the bursts are due to especially large supernovas, great stellar outbursts called hypernovas...
...January, NASA will launch the HETE-2 satellite, which will study not only gamma-ray bursts but also their lingering afterglow of X rays and optical light. Three years later, a larger satellite with keener vision will conduct similar work in more depth. "Classical astronomers thought stars produced a steady emission in one wavelength," says Gehrels. "Now we realize we have all these flashing, transient things going on." Modern astronomers --with their modern machines--may at last determine what some of those strangest things...