Word: strontium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Corals, it turns out, are like miniature thermometers and rain gauges. When water temperatures rise, these small creatures incorporate less strontium into their skeletons than they do under cooler conditions. Their oxygen content, meanwhile, records salinity swings, which in turn can be used to estimate rainfall. And warm temperatures and heavy rainfall--here, at least--are the telltale markers of El Nino...
...approved a new drug for treating the terrible suffering caused when breast or prostate cancer spreads to the bone. Called Metastron, the drug kills the pain of the cancer (though not the cancer) with radioactive strontium-89 delivered by injection. Metastron works better than narcotics for many patients, and a single shot lasts up to six months...
...back to their farm plots, where they consume contaminated animals and produce. "They would rather die here than live somewhere else," says Alexander Borovoi, a Russian nuclear physicist in charge of the sarcophagus. Some returned to find their homes pillaged of religious art. Although contaminated with cesium 137 and strontium 90, some of the icons have probably entered the world art market...
...public's dread centers on the radioactive elements that remain in spent fuel rods after atomic reactions. While such highly toxic fission products as strontium 90 and cesium 137 have half-lives of only about 30 years, other intensely radioactive substances like plutonium will endure for tens and even hundreds of millenniums, and are piling up fast. High-level waste -- that which is most radioactive -- from U.S. power plants is not voluminous. More than 30 years' worth totals 17,000 tons, a thimbleful compared with the slag that would result from generating equivalent power by burning coal. Yet this waste...