Word: supercold
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...become, the more they draw warmth from anything in the vicinity--often from one another. In 1995, however, a team led by physicists Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado at Boulder used lasers and evaporation to achieve something known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, a supercold gas in which atoms overlap and begin to move in synchrony. "We get to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero," says Wieman...
...such supercold temperatures, scientists believe, matter may start to exhibit bizarre and interesting new properties. Certainly, cold atoms can be trapped and manipulated in a variety of cunning ways. The fountains created by Chu, for example, are enabling scientists to observe atoms in free fall and thus measure gravitational force with unprecedented accuracy. Fountains are also helping scientists measure the oscillations of cesium atoms more precisely than ever before, and cesium atoms are to atomic clocks -- the world's most precise timepieces -- what quartz crystals are to wristwatches...
...solutions were devised. The gloppy layers of interior paint were frozen off with a sprayed treatment of supercold liquid nitrogen. Bolts holding the statue to the pedestal, each fastened with a nut as big as a layer cake, were tightened with a 30-ton hydraulic jack. Only one radical renovation was undertaken: Liberty's torch is entirely new. The old handle had corroded badly, and the flame had been replaced in 1916 by a leaky, kitschy amber-glass contraption. (It is now on display in the new granite entrance lobby, designed by the firm of Swanke Hayden Connell.) Appropriately, twelve...
...Feynman probed further, he was told by NASA that the surface temperature of the external tank, which contains supercold liquid oxygen (-297 degrees ) and hydrogen (-423 degrees ) had not been abnormally cold, casting doubt on a theory that liquid fuel, leaking unnoticed from the tank, had chilled the nearby booster. He also discovered that the wind on the morning of the launch had been blowing across the cold surface of the tank toward the right booster. As one NASA engineer explained, "Even a slight breeze, wafting over the external tank full of those cryogens (supercold fluids) may have been enough...
...time of the launch the air temperature had risen to 38 degrees, but a dramatically lower temperature on the surface of the booster might have been an indication that supercold liquid hydrogen was leaking from the huge external fuel tank, investigators...