Word: neared
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hundreds of feet beneath the ground outside the Swiss town of Meyrin, near Geneva, a six-year, $660 million construction project is rushing toward a payoff. Workers at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) have excavated a 12-ft.-wide circular tunnel that is 16 miles in circumference, installed nearly 5,000 powerful electromagnets, and put along the ring four massive detectors, each weighing several tons but sensitive to the passage of a single subatomic particle. This week, if all goes according to plan, technicians will begin test runs of the largest scientific instrument in the world...
That is not to say that the U.S. is second rate. The Tevatron, an accelerator at Fermilab, near Chicago, that smashes together protons and antiprotons, is still the most powerful collider in the world, and the proposed superconducting supercollider, planned for Texas, will be more powerful still. Proton-antiproton collisions entail more energy than electron- positron collisions and thus are more likely to generate previously undiscovered particles. But proton-antiproton impacts generate more subatomic debris, which makes it harder to study the properties of individual particles carefully. For what Amaldi calls "precision physics," Europe could soon...
...electric fields created along power-line paths; Florida has also adopted a standard for magnetic fields. Fremont, Calif., requires that potential buyers of new homes adjacent to overhead lines be warned of possible health risks. Last month in Florida a judge declared that pupils of Sandpiper Shores Elementary School near Boca Raton could not play in a major portion of the schoolyard because of nearby power cables...
Faced with the present uncertainty, what should a person do? Home buyers might want to consider whether electrical cables are near a desired property, but experts do not advise people to sell their homes to escape being close to power lines. Instead, some easy, inexpensive changes make sense. Among them: use electric blankets only to warm beds before retiring, place the electric alarm clock across the room instead of by the bed and sit at least ten feet away from the television set. Above all, avoid excessive worrying. Until the verdict is in, the watchword is prudence, not panic...
...President called for a constitutional amendment to carve an unprecedented exception in the Bill of Rights and allow states to make flag burning a crime. Bush delivered his announcement while standing with Republican congressional leaders in front of the Iwo Jima memorial at a hurriedly arranged photo opportunity near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. "The flag is too sacred to be abused," he said. "If it is not defended, it is defamed...