Word: richter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rich Caspian agricultural provinces of Zanjan and Gilan cover 20,000 sq. mi. In one minute the earthquake, which measured as high as 7.7 on the Richter scale, turned scores of towns into wastelands of flattened houses and apartment buildings. Entire villages were reduced to rubble, their inhabitants buried beneath mountains of debris. Television film showed young men frantically trying to free victims from slides of dirt and the remains of homes. Women in black chadors clustered in town squares, fearful of returning home or lacking a home to return to. Children wept among the dead and the injured. Amid...
...produces earthquakes. What scientists should be grateful to learn is that the reason the plates shift is that somebody is playing the piano accordion. Tectonic plates are very sensitive: they cannot abide the sound of accordion playing, and when they hear all that caterwauling, they shift uncomfortably, jolting the Richter scale to A above high C. It is no coincidence that earthquakes occur wherever huge numbers of accordion players congregate. Many of them are said to be aswarm in eastern China, where earthquakes are common, although the Red Cross has not yet been able to confirm this...
...distress. Deborah Norville, new co-anchor on the Today show and a closet accordion player, assaulted her audience with a blunt instrument rendition of the dreaded Lady of Spain. No earthquakes were reported, though the performance succeeded in further sinking the show's shaky Nielsens, while Norville's personal Richter rating slid glissando-style to C below low A, somewhere to the left of the keyboard...
SLAC. Burton Richter, director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is the maverick of particle physics. While others have recently concentrated on circular accelerators, he has touted the merits of linear models. His latest machine shoots streams of electrons and positrons down a straightaway and then loops them through two semicircular sections onto a collision course. Linear accelerators cannot produce nearly as many collisions as do circular models of comparable power, but Richter claims that the noncircular approach can be an economical way to make discoveries in the vanguard of physics...
...Richter has already made his share of breakthroughs. In 1974 he found and named the psi particle, which gave physicists conclusive evidence that quarks really exist. For spotting the psi, Richter shared the Nobel with Ting, who found the same particle at the same time and called it the J. The particle now bears both names, but, says Richter, "when you're talking to Ting, you'd better call it the J/psi. When you're talking to me, call it the psi/J...