Word: nuclei
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Posner’s credit, Catastrophe does anticipate Gabrielse’s counter-argument. Posner writes that “a cosmic ray hitting a fixed target such as the moon will tend to scatter the nuclei that it hits, making it less likely that they will clump”—and thus produce strange matter—“than if the collision were head on,” as it would be inside RHIC. So, the fact that the moon has existed for 4.5 billion years without condensing into a tiny ball does not necessarily...
...Posner’s credit, Catastrophe does anticipate Gabrielse’s counter-argument. Posner writes that “a cosmic ray hitting a fixed target such as the moon will tend to scatter the nuclei that it hits, making it less likely that they will clump”—and thus produce strange matter—“than if the collision were head on,” as it would be inside RHIC. So, the fact that the moon has existed for 4.5 billion years without condensing into a tiny ball does not necessarily...
Given that we haven't found any life beyond Earth yet, "remarkably hospitable" may sound a bit strong. At a deep level, though, it's true. Many of the most fundamental characteristics of our cosmos--the relative strengths of gravity, electromagnetism and the forces that operate inside atomic nuclei as well as the masses and relative abundances of different particles--are so finely tuned that if just one of them were even slightly different, life as we know it couldn't exist...
...These pollutants, which take the form of tiny, airborne particles called aerosols, act as nuclei around which cloud droplets form. The problem is, there are too many aerosols in the atmosphere competing for water molecules, so the cloud droplets that form are too small and never become weighty enough to fall to the ground. As a result, says Beate Liepert, an atmospheric physicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the atmosphere could be filled with moisture while Earth's surface thirsts for rain...
...scientists' basic strategy was the same as in most post-Dolly cloning experiments: remove the nucleus of the egg, with its single set of chromosomes, and replace it with the nucleus of a mature cell, containing two sets (in this case, the mature nuclei came from cumulus cells, which surround eggs during development). With a quantity of eggs that a commentary in Science calls "whopping," the scientists were able to experiment with different techniques to find which worked best--varying the time between inserting the new nucleus and zapping it with electricity to trigger cell division, for example, or testing...