Word: nuclei
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...mile tunnel that slices through the rolling countryside behind Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., was built for one purpose only: to house a linear accelerator with a beam of 20-billion-volt electrons that might knock stubborn secrets out of atomic nuclei. The accelerator is not yet complete, but its construction has already led to a striking discovery in the unexpected field of paleontology. A bulldozer digging a trench at the end of the tunnel veered a few feet from its guideline and uncovered a ponderous and peculiar skeleton...
...only woman besides Marie Curie to win (1903) a Nobel physics prize, Mrs. Mayer was honored for research showing that atomic nuclei are built of onionlike layers of neutrons and protons held together by complicated forces. This concept, paralleling work by Professor Jensen, replaced the idea that the nucleus resembles a liquid drop, and it explained many nuclear properties...
Working with Brookhaven's powerful Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, they slammed a stream of antiprotons into a bubble chamber full of liquid hydrogen. As the antiprotons hit the stationary hydrogen nuclei-which were also protons-they annihilated each other, giving off energy and filling the 20-in. chamber with a sudden splash of new, extremely short-lived particles...
...week experimental teams on opposite coasts of the U.S. confirmed its existence. They used two of the world's largest atom smashers, Brookhaven's Synchrotron and Berkeley's Bevatron, to fire negatively charged K mesons into a hydrogen bubble chamber. After the mesons collided with hydrogen nuclei, the scientists found two K mesons that were the decay products of an even more ephemeral particle. It has a life span of just 2/1 0,000th of a billionth of a billionth of a second-or just long enough to travel a few widths of an atomic nucleus...
Exquisite Chemistry. Geneticists who looked through microscopes at chromosomes taken from cell nuclei had noticed long ago that in some of their slides there was an unusually dark spot. Not until 1949 did Canada's Dr. Murray Llewellyn Barr realize that the spot appeared only in female cells. This discovery alone was invaluable for determining the true or nuclear sex in many cases involving various degrees of hermaphroditism.* But what was the spot...