Word: pinning
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Physicists had long speculated about the existence of neutrinos, particles that appear in all radioactive processes. Because the elusive neutrino is essentially without mass or charge, it was difficult to pin down. Lederman calculates that a single neutrino has only a fifty-fifty chance of being deflected when streaming through 100 million miles of solid steel. The young physicists used the powerful accelerator in Brookhaven, L.I., to produce and aim a flood of protons at a beryllium metal target. The stupendous collisions of protons slamming into the barrier shattered atomic nuclei, releasing new particles, including neutrinos. The particles then...
Probably the last thing George Bush and Michael Dukakis wanted to think about last week was how often they would meet with the press after being elected. Like any other special-interest group hoping to pin down the future President, however, a band of prominent journalists tried to get the candidates to commit themselves to the No. 1 item on the press's 1988 wish list: more news conferences...
...campaign issue, the nation's huge budget deficit, the questioners were unable to pin the candidates down on just how they can reduce it and still acquire the military weapons and social programs they support. Dukakis repeated his unpersuasive solution of tougher tax enforcement. He stressed welfare reforms that would put more poor people to work as a way to cut spending and simultaneously bring in more tax revenue. Bush argued that "we've got to get the Democrats' Congress under control" to hold down spending...
...gymnastics, officials were also in the thick of the fight. Judge Ellen Berger, a pin-eyed East German with the soul of Leo Durocher, detected a U.S. irregularity involving the bat boy. Poor Rhonda Faehn: three years ago, at 14, she left Coon Rapids, Minn., for Houston to tumble with the other dolls at the trick knee of the Rumanian defector Bela Karolyi. When she missed making the Olympic team by 0.1 point, he brought her along as a roustabout. Docked 0.5 points for Faehn's harmless presence on the platform, the U.S. women lost the bronze medal...
...post-Watergate world, we have all become suckers for smoking guns and Murphy exploits this weakness in his readers to the hilt. His telling of the confirmation hearings is breathtaking, with Strom Thurmond, Sam Ervin and others titans of the Senate's conservative wing desperately trying to pin down their cagey witness, while Murphy treats his readers to the bombshells that his inquisitors never could draw...