Word: x-rays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...America. So quite a crowd gathered when the Pakistani postman strolled into the dusty courtyard of Mohammed Azeem's house and delivered the letter. Azeem didn't know anyone in America. The envelope had a pretty stamp of Mt. McKinley and an unusual return address: Detainee, JBC, 160 Camp X-Ray. Even more mysterious, the missive bore the name of Azeem's son, Issa Khan, given up for dead months ago by his family...
Today most forensics labs that conduct the test rely instead on scanning electron microscopes. Just touch a bit of tape to a suspect's hands, place it under the scope and hit it with a stream of electrons. The elements in gunpowder give off distinct X-ray signatures, and if they are there, the electron beam will spot them. The drawback? "You don't get to see the terror on people's faces when you pour hot paraffin on their hands," says Fischer. "I think it encouraged some people to confess...
...Koshiba and Davis split half the Nobel for their neutrino work; Giacconi, meanwhile, gets the other half of the approximately $1 million prize. His achievement: building a series of X-ray telescopes that have laid bare the secrets of such exotic heavenly objects as quasars, black holes and super-dense neutron stars. And like Koshiba and Davis, he has helped to rectify humanity?s cosmic myopia...
...mummy's bandages glued them in place, which meant the body was damaged as it was removed from the sarcophagus. Studying the corpse literally limb by limb, the first anatomist found nothing suspicious. More than 40 years later, however, in 1968, a University of Liverpool researcher received permission to X-ray the mummy and discovered some intriguing clues: there was a sliver of bone floating in the brain cavity and a dense area at the base of the skull that may have been a blood clot, suggesting a severe--perhaps deliberately lethal--blow to the back of the head...
...both Ernst and Picasso in the 1960s and recalls stark differences. "Ernst was utterly cultivated. I remember he was always reading - poetry, natural science, everything. Picasso? I felt he could have lifted a book to his eyes without opening it and absorbed it through its cover with instant X-ray vision...