Word: nuclei
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FUSION. The ideal solution is to reproduce the sun's own process of joining atomic nuclei to produce clean, safe energy. The process, which also powers the hydrogen bomb, releases so much energy, and the hydrogen used as fuel is so abundant in sea water, that fusion could fill the world's electricity needs for millions of years. But the practical difficulties of confining nuclear particles in "bottles" of magnetic energy (at temperatures approaching 60 million degrees F.) are such that most experts do not foresee fusion working before 1990 at the earliest...
Apart from ISR, all atom smashers rely on the same basic principle: subatomic particles-usually protons-are accelerated to high velocities and slammed at stationary targets. Upon impact, the nuclei in the target atoms break apart, scattering the fragments for physicists to observe. This "bash-and-see approach" has drawbacks. As an accelerator's bullets approach the speed of light, the strange effects predicated by the relativity theory begin to take a toll: the proton's mass becomes much larger than that of the stationary targets. Much of the proton's energy is spent simply in pushing...
...cells used by Molecular Biologists Carl Merril, Mark Geier and John Petricciani at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. were taken from a victim of the hereditary disease called galactosemia. Because of a defect in the genes in the nuclei of his cells, the victim was unable to produce the essential enzyme that enables the body to metabolize galactose, a simple sugar found in milk and other dairy products. Unless an infant born with the defect is quickly placed on a milk-free diet, he faces malnutrition, mental retardation and even death...
...excitement went beyond the light experiment. Hundreds of technicians, engineers and scientists had worked since March at modifying the Berkeley Bevatron-which was designed for experiments with high-energy protons-to accelerate even heavier particles: nitrogen ions. As a result, McMillan announced at a press conference last week, nitrogen nuclei had been boosted to 36 billion electron volts, the highest energy level ever attained for such heavy particles in a laboratory...
...Bare Nuclei. What the Bevatron apparatus had really done was create a kind of homemade cosmic ray, a big step in bringing the universe down to earth. Like cosmic rays from outer space, the particles shot through the Bevatron are really bare nuclei of atoms-in this case nitrogen-that have been stripped of their electrons and accelerated to tremendous velocities. By shooting these tiny bullets into a plastic target rich in hydrogen atoms, the Berkeley team was able to dissect the laboratory-produced cosmic rays. The collisions fragmented the nitrogen nuclei into every element lighter than nitrogen...