Word: seaborg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Seaborg Tells. Until recently, atomic doodlers had little real information. But last week, Glenn T. Seaborg, codiscoverer of plutonium, and leading chemist of the Manhattan Project, released a gob of it. Said Seaborg: "It is not at all out of the question that the greatest gains to humanity from the atomic energy development will result from the widespread use of tracers...
...tracers" Seaborg meant radioactive tags attached to chemical elements. Radioactive carbon, for instance, follows ordinary carbon through the most complicated chemical reactions, and its progress can be traced by its radioactive effects. Thus if an infinitesimal part of the carbon in sugar is made radioactive and fed to a human being, physiologists can follow it through the digestive tract, into the blood, the muscles, and out through the lungs as carbon dioxide...
...when University of California scientists produced a new, "synthetic" element (neptunium) by bombarding uranium with neutrons from a cyclotron. Neptunium has 93 electrons, which meant that the list of known elements was growing at the heavy end. It grew some more that same year when Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg and co-workers synthesized plutonium, which has 94 electrons...
Last week Dr. Seaborg, speaking at Chicago, made another momentous announcement. By bombarding uranium and plutonium with high-energy helium ions, he produced two more elements: Nos. 95 and 96. He told little more about them, for like all atomic scientists, Dr. Seaborg still has G-men breathing down his neck. But all elements heavier than uranium are supposedly unstable. Numbers 95 and 96 will certainly be of interest to atomic bombardiers...