Word: paraffins
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Last week Enrico Fermi had his picture taken holding a hollow globe of paraffin as big as a pumpkin, standing beside a piece of apparatus that looked like stovepipe put together with baling wire (see cut). Said Dr. Fermi: "The most obvious application of artificial radioactivity which can be foreseen is in the medicinal field. Radium, naturally radioactive, is used for the treatment of cancer. The completely new radioactive substances created in the laboratory should give medical men new tools, some of which may prove more efficient than radium...
...slow neutrons were more easily captured than fast ones, worked out the equation for the slowing effect of hydrogen nuclei. Since the hydrogen atom, having only one outside electron, consists almost entirely of nucleus, it is excellent for braking fast neutrons, and substances rich in hydrogen such as water, paraffin and oil are commonly used for this purpose...
...lathe for turning out baseball bats. It is used to pull eyelets out of tennis shoes, a dial registering the force needed. A machine with a rocking arrangement stretches sheets of shoe rubber until they tear. To test the safety-toe caps of miners' boots, a cake of paraffin is put in the toe and an iron weight dropped from a height of 4 ft. on the boot tip. If the cake shows any signs of flattening, the manufacturer makes the toe cap stronger...
...into the can business, the bottle industry was being attacked on another front. Last week Borden Co., big milk distributor, announced that milk sold to 200 stores of American Stores Co. in northern New Jersey would be packaged in Pure-Pak, a container made of spruce-fibre lined with paraffin. Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea stores were also said to be interested in Pure-Pak milk. Milk bottles cost between 4? and 5? but make 20 trips at an average cost of about ^ a trip. The paper con- tainer costs from 1¼? to 1½?, makes only one trip...
...neutrons a second by smashing lightweight elements with deutons (nuclei of heavy hydrogen). With "slow neutrons" lately it has been found possible to produce gamma radiation from silver. For mathematical reasons that physicists find increasingly hard to translate into English, slow neutrons braked by a paraffin shield have more effect on the target than fast ones, are currently lionized in every physics journal...