Word: nuclear
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Game is a documentary about nuclear war and a small Kentish town. It was commissioned by the BBC and promptly banned by the BBC after a first screening. It was, the BBC explained, too effective...
...said they feared that the terrors of the deadpan, we're-here-on-the-scene reporting would send the public into the streets screaming as did the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. Charged Director Peter Watkins, "The BBC was really afraid that the truth about the effects of nuclear war would result in a massive protest to ban the bomb...
...heaviest element that exists naturally on earth. Gradually these "transuranium" elements disappeared, decomposing by radioactive decay into lighter and more stable elements. During the past few decades, however, at least eleven transuranium elements and their isotopes have reappeared, thanks to the ingenuity of man. In their latest atomic synthesis, nuclear physicists have produced the heaviest atom known to man, a new isotope of the element mendelevium, which itself was first artificially created...
...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...
...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...