Word: geigers
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...discovery was good news to the 800 uranium prospectors now wandering over the vast Colorado Plateau. Some are gnarled, weather-beaten desert rats packing their gear on a mule, looking for telltale yellow uranium streaks on the faces of weathered cliffs. Others are pink-cheeked amateurs with Geiger counters who clamber over the rocks, listening with ear phones for radioactive clicks, thus providing a source of innocent merriment (see cut). At Marysvale, claims have been staked on every inch of land for eight miles around Segmiller's strike, and the town citizens are now spending almost all their time...
...best way to look for uranium, says the booklet, is with a Geiger counter, now manufactured by dozens of companies and retailing for as little as $54.50. Geiger counters click all the time because of "background radioactivity" caused by cosmic rays and the tiny amounts of radioactive materials present in most rocks. The prospector should first record the "background count"; any increase is interesting. "If the radioactivity of any particular rock is four times the background count," says the handbook, "a sample should be taken...
...rather plaintive chapter in the Government's booklet answers some questions which the AEC has been getting from would-be prospectors. The Government, it says, will not finance prospectors, nor will it lend or rent Geiger counters. It discourages people who write that they have found a place where their watches or compasses don't work (uranium does not affect watches or compasses). And phosphorescence (from decayed stumps at night) is not a sign that uranium is present...
...green silkworms crawling around the Harvard laboratory of Assistant Professor (of zoology) Carroll Milton Williams look like normal specimens, but when Professor Williams tests them with a Geiger counter, they make it rattle like a cornpopper. The caterpillars are radioactive. Soon they will spin cocoons of radioactive silk and will eventually emerge, if not disturbed, as radioactive moths...
...gadget that is playing an increasingly important role in our lives is the Geiger counter, which...