Word: physicist
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...many researchers, however, the single greatest threat to U.S. science, and a source of many of its troubles, is money -- or a lack of it. That view came into sharp focus in January when Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman, the newly elected president of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science, issued what he called his "cry of alarm...
...about the wisdom of the gulf war. A preliminary report issued last month by the Environmental Protection Agency admitted that particles in the smoke could be a "major hazard" but contended that there was little immediate risk to healthy Kuwaitis from noxious gases, a finding that astounded some observers. Physicist Henry Kendall, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the fires are burning with a poor 70% to 90% efficiency, guaranteeing that a stew of poisons is being shot into the atmosphere...
...imaginary time machine that takes advantage of an Einsteinian concept: that both space and time are distorted in the presence of very large masses or when objects are moving at speeds approaching the velocity of light. Gott is not the first to take this tack; in 1988 a Caltech physicist, Kip Thorne, and two colleagues constructed their own theoretical time machine and wrote about it in the same journal...
...until last fall that a team of scientists produced visible aggregations of buckyballs. At first, University of Arizona physicist Donald Huffman and his German colleague, Wolfgang Kratschmer, thought they had come up with nothing more extraordinary than a thimbleful of grimy soot. Then their microscope revealed a swarm of translucent specks that sparkled like stars in a moonless sky. "As soon as we saw these beautiful little crystals," Huffman recalls, "we knew we were looking at something no one had ever seen before...
Their shape may turn out to be a structural achievement that on the molecular level is as noteworthy as the keystone arch. "This molecule," says IBM physicist Donald Bethune, "looks like something some genius engineer sat down and designed." In essence, a buckyball forms a cage that begs to be filled. By placing different atoms inside the cage, scientists should be able to engineer materials with unique electronic, catalytic and even biomedical properties. One intriguing possibility: if they prove nontoxic, buckyballs might encapsulate radioactive atoms used in cancer therapy, serving as shields that protect normal tissue from damage...