Word: labs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...before the big bang was touched off. The bomb builders found what they wanted at the University of California's famed Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where Drs. Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan had put together some synthetic plutonium, element 94. Until then, plutonium was no more than a lab curiosity, but it proved to be properly fissionable, and it was so slightly radioactive that only half of it would disintegrate in 24,100 years...
...that it had developed just such a gadget. Unlike earlier devices, which are cumbersome, slow to report or have to be read with close attention, the O.R.N.L. "Personal Radiation Monitor" is no larger than a fountain pen and reacts unmistakably as soon as it scents trouble. Clipped to a lab worker's clothing, the monitor gives off high-pitched chirps and flashes an orange neon light whenever it detects radiation. The stronger the radiation, the faster the chirps and flashes...
...time. Its tiny mercury battery is good for a month of steady operation. Now properly equipped workers will no longer have to take time off to read a meter or check a counter. Their personal monitor will give them the word. "It is intended to tell lab personnel whenever there has been a change of radiation level," says an Oak Ridge scientist. The workers put it more succinctly: "It tells us when to run like hell...
...M.I.T.'s wartime Radiation Lab was done the major U.S. work in developing radar. From M.I.T.'s Instrumentation Lab came advanced gyroscopic bombsights and the inertial guidance systems for the Polaris missile and nuclear submarines. M.I.T.'s Lincoln Lab worked out the U.S.'s DEW line early-warning system against attack by enemy aircraft, the SAGE system to coordinate retaliation, and the BMEWS system for warning against enemy missiles. At M.I.T.'s Millstone Hill field station at Westford, Mass., is the 84-ft. dish antenna that has bounced radar pulses off the planet Venus...
...example is the senior-year aerodynamics course taught by Associate Professor Erik Mollö-Christensen. First, Mollö-Christensen holds a lottery, and the number each student draws corresponds to something in the lab-a piece of wire, a piece of plastic tubing or of plywood. Working in pairs, the students are required to determine the modulus of elasticity of the material they drew. Two students, working with a piece of brass, determined its elasticity by measuring the speed at which sound passed along it. Explains Mollö-Christensen: "They can do it any way they want to-so long...