Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years. The half- milers are bad enough, but these giant ones pose a threat to the entire planet. It was such an asteroid (or an equivalent-size comet) that many scientists believe caused the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. The primary evidence, discovered by the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, a geologist, is a layer of the element iridium laid down in sedimentary rock at about the time the giant reptiles disappeared. Iridium is rare on the earth's surface but more common in asteroids...
More exhaustive tests are under way. Among the most promising is a collaboration between Brookhaven National Laboratory and Yale University. Says Moshe Gai, a Yale physicist who is a member of the team: "We've got first- class chemists and physicists and an array of neutron detectors." Brookhaven physicist Kelvin Lynn believes they should know very soon whether last month's announcements represent an unidentified chemical reaction or an ) unsuspected form of fusion. The world can hardly wait for an answer...
Then the details of the experiment began to emerge. By an informal process known as "publication by fax," copies of a paper Pons and Fleischmann had prepared began to circulate from lab to lab. Next, one of the best-known figures in the field, physicist Steven Jones of Brigham Young University, announced that he too had achieved fusion in a jar, although, significantly, with far lower energy output. Even a pair of Hungarian scientists claimed to have carried out room-temperature fusion...
Another cause of skepticism about the elections was the bloc of 750 seats reserved for official and public organizations. But even there, insurgency reigned. Leaders of the Soviet Academy of Sciences produced a limp slate of 23 nominees for their 20 reserved seats, pointedly excluding physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel laureate and human-rights activist. But the membership voted down 15 of them, which means that the academy's leaders must come up with new candidates, presumably including Sakharov this time. The Soviet Peace Committee, a goodwill and propaganda organization, was allotted five seats. Among those elected by the group...
...telescope, the Gamma Ray Observatory and Ulysses, the first probe to study the sun's polar regions. But some experts worry about relying too heavily on the shuttle. "I certainly hope that these missions will go off as planned," says James Van Allen, the University of Iowa physicist who discovered the Van Allen radiation belts that ring the earth. "But the shuttle is not out of the woods yet. After Challenger, NASA should have made a decision to go to expendable rockets for all space science...