Word: neutron
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...back as the 1930s, Dr. Robert Stone of the University of California at Berkeley used neutron irradiation against cancer. But Stone's tests so severely damaged healthy tissue that the treatment was not revived until the 1960s at London's Hammersmith Hospital. The British physicians not only aimed the neutrons more precisely, but also adjusted the dosage so as to hold down immediate side effects...
Following the British lead, Houston's M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute, the U.S. Naval Research Lab, and the University of Washington in Seattle have all started using neutron irradiation. But Fermilab has a special advantage: it delivers neutrons at higher energies and thus can probe deeper into the tumors...
...from space. She called the beat-like pulses to the attention of Astronomer Antony Hewish, the senior scientist. Hewish's team at first suspected them to be signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. But further inquiry proved that pulsars, as the signal sources were named, were actually long-sought neutron stars, small and incredibly dense collapsed stars. So significant was the discovery to the understanding of stellar evolution that Team Leader Hewish was honored as co-winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics...
Radio Beacon. Further observations by Hewish and other radio astronomers soon put this tantalizing speculation to rest but eventually confirmed that a pulsar is a neutron star. Space, in fact, seems to be full of neutron stars. Since Hewish and his assistant, Jocelyn Bell, found the first one, about 100 more have been identified by astronomers. A neutron star is a bizarre object. It is formed when a giant star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses inward on itself, crushing much of its matter into a ball of neutrons some ten miles in diameter-but so dense that a thimbleful...
Astrophysicists had postulated the existence of neutron stars in the 1930s but had despaired of ever discovering them; they were too small, scientists felt, for their light to be detected from earth. Hewish's observations confirmed that these strange bodies, conceived in the mind of man, really exist in the far reaches of space...