The Tracker got excited when spotting this headline: “Neutron Accelerator Sets World Record.” Wow, how do you accelerate a neutron — that is, a naked one not buried inside a heavy ion? But that’s just the hed. The AP‘s Duncan Mansfield gets it right in his lede, discussing the warm-up performance of the Spallation Neutron Source facility at Oak Ridge, “the world’s most powerful acccelerator-based source of neutrons for scientific research.” That little hyphenated modifier makes all the difference.
The story announced no new science. It’s a workmanlike report on how the big, $1.4 billion machine will give materials scientists what the lab boss calls, in commendably plain English, a “very fancy microscope for seeing how atoms are put together, one at a time.”
-CP
Grist for the Mill: ORNL Press Release;
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