Word: hulet
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...often the case in science, researchers at the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory were attempting to synthesize an entirely different isotope when mendelevium 258 was created. A team led by 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...
...understands why mendelevium 258 is so long-lived. "It's possible," speculates Hulet, "that because of the structure of the nucleus, certain kinds of decay are hindered." Whatever the reason, scientists are delighted. The long half life will enable 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...
...Side by Side." Last week, settling back for a winter's hibernation in his white bungalow in Aberdeen, Hulet calculated his season's kills at 56, fretted to his wife about a lost dog ("Queen's a part of me, kind of wildlike and vicious to everyone but me"), and spun yarns to a visitor about great hunts of the past: "The closest call I've ever knowed, I shot a bear at close range that was tearin' at the dogs. The bear he jumped up and leaped right at me. I shot...
After a lifetime of bear hunting, Bear Bill Hulet has an intense admiration for the intelligence of his quarry. He hunts because the bear is a challenge, rationalizes his career by citing the damage done by the animal: "I look out over all those little trees comin' up, thousands and thousands of 'em, just astandin' on some hilltop or other, and I think to myself, 'Bill, all those trees are for you to take care of and raise up.' And that's what I've been doing all these years, looking out over...