Word: x
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most elections all you need to know to vote is how to pull a lever or scratch an X. Not so in Cambridge, where ability to count is required, and a master's degree in logic encouraged...
Next to each of the names on the ballot is a blank box, in which voters must pencil a ranking. ("Do Not Use X Marks," the ballot warns.) Instead, pick your favorite candidate and mark him down as number one. The second-best person for the job should get your number two, and so on, all the way up until 23. Many people give up after eight or nine names because votes are unlikely to be meaningful after that point. "People do all kinds of crazy things--they mark X's, they cross out names, they write slogans...
...never met, never corresponded. But on opposite sides of the Atlantic, U.S. Physicist Allan Cormack, 55, of Tufts University, and Research Engineer Godfrey Hounsfield, 60, of the British firm EMI Ltd., brooded over the same mathematical puzzle and independently reached the same solution. The puzzle: how to produce an X-ray image of tissue at any depth within a patient. The result: the CAT (for computerized axial tomography) scanner, a medical marvel now used in hospitals round the world. Last week the two scientists learned that they have something else in common: they will share the 1979 Nobel Prize...
Cormack took the first step. A native of Johannesburg, South Africa, he became intrigued in 1956 by the difficulty doctors had in obtaining X-ray pictures of the brain. Because the cranium is so thick, they could make an X-ray beam "see" an abnormality only by injecting a patient with tracer dyes or air bubbles. When Cormack immigrated to the U.S. that year (he became an American citizen a decade later), he began exploring the physics of how X rays pass through differing body parts. Dividing this passage into cross-sectional slices, he found he could calculate the absorption...
...then, widespread use of the scanner has drawn critics who argue that the machine's hefty price-up to $700,000 and more-drives up the cost of medical care at hospitals that could get by with cheaper methods. But the Nobel Committee declared: "No other method within X-ray diagnostics has led to such remarkable success in such a short time...