Word: rails
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...devices are called railguns, not because they sit atop railroad cars, like World War I artillery pieces, but because they consist of two parallel rails which act as both gunpowder and barrel. When the gun is fired, a powerful pulse of electricity goes down one rail. As the current surges to the other rail, it vaporizes a metallic fuse in back of the bullet, creating a cloud of electrically charged particles, or plasma. Simultaneously, it generates a strong magnetic field between the rails, like those in an electric motor. The field exerts a force against the plasma, just...
...which increases the thrust of the magnetic field by squeezing it with a carefully directed explosive charge, a technology pioneered during nuclear weaponry research. When the gun is fired, the electric surge ignites the near end of an explosive strip placed just on the outside of one of the rails. As the detonation speeds forward, faster than the blink of an eye, it presses one rail against the other, confining the magnetic field between them in an ever smaller space and imparting still greater velocity to plasma and projectile. Teams led by Physicists Ronald Hawke and Max Fowler have fired...
...fire--which shot sparks as high as the station's ceiling--began at 9:22 a.m. at the east end of the station when a short circuit ignited the "live" 600-volt rail on the subway track...
...griping, an unmoveable target. The national Conservatives could play on local sentiment and run a Reagan-like campaign, pledging to "restore" power to the provinces. Levesque's Parti Quebecois will doubtless try to capitalize on any pro-Anglophone or pro-West articles in the constitution; other provinces could rail against concessions to Quebec. The possibility of a wealthy province like Alberta withdrawing from a revised federation is greater then many think. Variations on Levesque's "sovereignty-association" formula for secession may prove the wave of the future...
...week's end Baghdad was claiming the recapture of the land the Iraqis consider theirs. The rail line from Iran's southwest oil towns to Tehran was said to have been cut by Iraqi forces, and the border towns of Khorramshahr and Abadan, where the refinery was still burning days after the first bombardment, remained besieged. Western observers assumed that the Iraqi objectives were limited and doubted that they would try to advance much farther. The Iraqi army does not have the logistics to support a campaign deep in enemy territory. And if it tried to push toward...