Word: neutron
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...remote villages, a few local tribespeople insisted on returning at midweek to the lands farmed by their ancestors. Their homecoming could not have been a happy one. As the Rev. Fred Tern Horn, a Dutch priest who serves in the area, described the scene, "it was as though a neutron bomb had exploded." All of the huts and buildings remained intact, and the mountains and tropical forests appeared unscathed. But almost no life stirred for miles around...
...cosmological community when they countered an early version of the big-bang theory of the universe with their steady state model, which stipulated the continual creation of matter (a concept now completely out of favor). In 1968 Gold was the first to propose that pulsars were rapidly rotating neutron stars (all evidence suggests he was right). In the mid-1960s he sparked another ruckus by predicting that the first spacecraft to land on the moon could encounter a mile-thick layer of dust that, if loose, would engulf the vehicle (the lunar surface, of course, was perfectly firm...
DIED. Iosif Shklovskii, 68, maverick Soviet astrophysicist and radio astronomer who made basic discoveries about neutron stars, quasars and novas (exploding stars), and also led the Soviets' search for extraterrestrial intelligence; of undisclosed causes; in Moscow. In the mid-1960s he posited that some intense radio emissions came from advanced alien civilizations, but they proved to be from quasars. Shklovskii's 1966 collaborative book with U.S. Astronomer Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe, is still considered the basic treatise on the prospects for life beyond earth...
Quarks are believed to be the basic building blocks of all larger atomic particles. Three of them are bound together to form each proton and neutron in the neuclei of atoms...
Through Keck, the space telescope and other new devices, astronomers hope to get a closer look at a myriad of cosmic quandaries: quasars; pulsars, the spinning neutron stars that transmit precisely spaced radio pulses; and the dusty smudges around some stars, which could be the beginnings of planetary systems much like the sun's. And because light from space, traveling at 186,000 miles a second, takes time to reach the earth, the deeper into space astronomers can probe, the farther back into the past they can see. Says Schmidt: "By looking farther out in the universe, you are paging...