Word: physicists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...four astronauts who will venture outside Endeavour to work on the Hubble -- Musgrave, Jeffrey Hoffman, Thomas Akers and Kathryn Thornton -- are all veteran spacewalkers. Thornton, a nuclear physicist and mother of five, went on the 1992 mission that repaired the Intelsat communications satellite. On that flight, the 5-ft. 4-in. K.T., as the other astronauts call her, wasn't involved in wrestling the three-ton satellite into the shuttle's payload bay. (It eventually took three men to do that job.) This time, though, she will play a key role: installing the Hubble's corrective lenses. They will...
...supporters were appalled. "It's disheartening that a large number of fairly intelligent people could do such a dumb thing," lamented Nobel- prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman. His frustration is understandable. Since the 1930s, physicists have been using accelerators to smash atoms together and analyze the debris, with an impressive result: the discovery that matter in all its complex forms seems to be made up of just a few simple particles operating under a handful of basic forces. But this so-called Standard Model is a puzzle that's not quite complete, and finding the last pieces would take something like...
...Every time he smashes a world record, he just puts the bar a bit higher and goes at it again. It's not just that he's never satisfied with himself; he also knows his many competitors won't let the record stand. What Chu, a University of Houston physicist, and his rivals keep pushing higher and higher is the temperature at % which it's possible to create superconductors --those almost magical materials that allow electricity to flow through them with no resistance whatsoever. When scientists get the temperature high enough, superconductors could, among other wonderful things, make computers more...
...senior doctors acting for the local health authority said many cancer patients had died because their radiation dosages had been miscalculated. In 1982 the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary bought a computer programmed to determine precise dosages for cancer treatment. But it arrived minus an instruction manual. Senior physicist Margaret Grieveson assumed that a "correction factor" needed to adjust the dosages had not been programmed in. Unfortunately, it had. The result: in the years from 1982 to 1991, 1,045 patients received insufficient radiation. Four hundred and one died; 91 who are still alive have experienced a recurrence of cancer...
...lectures, sponsored by the Harvard University Council for Economic Affairs, are named after the physicist-turned-economist who oversaw the economic recovery in Taiwan...