Word: radiumator
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...science and the world last week. It can hurl electrons-particles of negative electricity-at nearly the speed of light. It can produce 20,000,000-volt X-rays, some ten times more than the world's biggest X-ray machine. It can out-radiate all the extracted radium supplies on earth-and its further abilities have scarcely been explored. While U.S. scientists speculated upon the discoveries the device might lead to, they welcomed to their front ranks its brilliant young inventor, Donald William Kerst, 30, who calls the machine a "betatron." The cyclotron, whose invention won a Nobel...
...volts within a fraction of a second. These fiercely energized electrons are then either: 1) Released continuously from the tube as a beam of beta rays-whence the betatron's name-which are one of the three types of radiation naturally given off by radium; or 2) Directed at a metal target, battering from it X-rays which are much more penetrating than radium's gamma rays. The betatron can produce as much radiation as over 1,000 grams of radium (world's supply: 750 grams...
...point-I'm glad it turned out this way. . . . The people I met were no more ignorant or ignoble than ordinary men. Some of them taught me a lot. I learned how to palm a deck of cards, how to cook spaghetti and even some valuable information on radium from a man who was jailed on confidence-game charges." Grinding out its grist for the Army, the draft struck some other strange sparks...
...rays can be imagined as streams of infinitesimal sub-atomic particles. They are similar to radium rays and they work in exactly the same way to destroy living cells. They are created when a powerful electric current-i.e., a stream of electrons -jumps through a vacuum tube and hits a "target,", usually a piece of tungsten. The electrons batter from the tungsten a secondary stream of chargeless particles, X-rays, whose wave lengths are thousands of times shorter than those of ultraviolet light and almost as short as those of radium's gamma rays. The shorter waves...
...hospitals on a new, more compact model, weighing about 4,000 pounds, one-quarter of this weight being lead to keep the rays from getting out into the hospitals. Costing some $40,000 apiece, every 1,000,000-volter is the equivalent of $90,000,000 worth of radium.* (Radium is still widely used in therapy because of its compactness: it can even be planted inside a patient and left there for a while to do its work...