Word: heavier
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...American people may find it hard to believe that the U.S. is winning the war in Viet Nam. They have, after all, been ladled too many over-sanguine assurances in the past, only to be confronted later with the familiar due bills of heavier manpower commitments, steeper costs and higher casualties. Nonetheless, one of the most exhaustive inquiries into the status of the conflict yet compiled offers considerable evidence that the weight of U.S. power, 21 years after the big build-up began, is beginning to make itself felt. Within the next 18 months or so, White House officials maintain...
Near the beginning of time, the universe almost certainly contained many elements heavier than uranium, the heaviest element that exists naturally on earth. Gradually these "transuranium" elements disappeared, decomposing by radioactive decay into lighter and more stable elements. During the past few decades, however, at least eleven transuranium elements and their isotopes have reappeared, thanks to the ingenuity of man. In their latest atomic synthesis, nuclear physicists have produced the heaviest atom known to man, a new isotope of the element mendelevium, which itself was first artificially created...
...Nuclear Chemist E. Kenneth Hulet was using the laboratory's heavy ion linear accelerator to bombard a tiny amount of einsteinium (a transuranium element discovered in 1952) with alpha particles which consist of two protons and two neutrons. "We expected the alpha particles to join with the heavier isotope of einsteinium," says Hulet, "and then decay by a process called 'electron capture' to fermium...
...them eventually to accumulate more substantial amounts of the new isotope and to study its properties at leisure. Even more important, mendelevium stays around long enough to make a good target for high-velocity particle accelerators. And it is by the bombardment of uranium and transuranium elements that even heavier elements and their isotopes have been created...
Hulet hopes to continue creating and identifying ever-heavier atoms. "We want to investigate the very limits of matter," he says. Much more than mere scientific curiosity could be involved. It was in an attempt to create transuranium elements that scientists first bombarded a rare isotope, uranium 235, with slow neutrons. Investigating the strange reaction that resulted, they discovered nuclear fission...