Wednesday, November 8, 2017

A little more Cold War nostalgia

And now, something much more chemistry-related. Via the Orange County Register's Lauren Williams: 
Forty years ago, George Miller and Vince Guinn were scientists conducting research in a small basement at UC Irvine, when a stranger walked in, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. 
The basement was filled with a small nuclear reactor, a machine that Miller and Guinn used to conduct the atomic analysis of, among other things, heavy metals. 
The briefcase was filled with fragments of the world’s most controversial bullet. 
The bullet fragments were so tiny that they were “little more than dust,” recalls Miller, now 80. But, tiny as they were, the fragments were clues in one of the biggest mysteries in American history — the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 
They’d been collected 14 years earlier by government investigators, the man with the briefcase explained. Now, their government had a request for Miller and Guinn: 
Would they use the school’s reactor and their scientific skills to answer the question that still loomed over the Kennedy assassination — did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?
Pretty cool little story. (Spoiler alert: Oswald did it.) 

4 comments:

  1. No: Back and to the left, back and to the left....

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  2. Neutron activation analysis is pretty under-regarded as a technique these days, outside of the elastomer field.

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  3. The analysis only confirmed that the fragments supplied by (the Illuminati, ZOG, the Mafia, the KKK, select one) had the same composition as Italian-made bullets.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20