Word: torus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Three Doughnuts. Britain's ZETA (Zero-Energy Thermonuclear Assembly), which was shown last week by Sir John Cockcroft at Harwell atomic laboratory, looks like three 10-ft. doughnuts laced together like links of a chain. The central horizontal torus (scientific word for a doughnut shape) is a ring-shaped aluminum vacuum chamber with a 39-in. bore. The two vertical doughnuts linked into it are the iron cores of a transformer. When a small amount of deuterium gas is fed into the evacuated torus and a heavy electric current is shot through the transformer, an even heavier current (this...
...deuterium, knocking its atoms apart into positive nuclei (deuterons) and negative electrons. When a powerful current flows through this sort of "plasma," a strange thing happens. The gas is compressed by the magnetic field that the current generates. It gathers in a ring at the center of the torus, and the current flowing through the ring heats the gas to millions of degrees...
...Harwell scientists, led by Peter Clive Thonemann, have made ZETA's pinch behave by passing a second current through coils around the torus. This current creates a second magnetic field which keeps the pinch away from the walls for as long as five one-thousandths of a second. The deuterium in it is heated to 5,000,000° C. (one-third of the temperature at the center of the sun), and free neutrons shoot out of the torus...
...Michael Cahaly's life centers around the remote past of Syria. When he talks of its history his voice loses its matter-of-fact quality and he waves his ever present cigar in wide, animated circles. "Once, Syria," he said, "was the old Syria that went from the Torus Mountains to the Sinai Desert. . . . Damascus was once the thinking brain of the whole Omyad Empire. . . And then they began cutting it up. . . But even the new Damascus is very, very beautiful. As beautiful as Paris or anywhere...