Direct mass measurements above uranium bridge the gap to the island of stability.

The mass of an atom incorporates all its constituents and their interactions. The difference between the mass of an atom and the sum of its building blocks (the binding energy) is a manifestation of Einstein's famous relation E = mc(2). The binding energy determines the energy available for nuclear reactions and decays (and thus the creation of elements by stellar nucleosynthesis), and holds the key to the fundamental question of how heavy the elements can be. Superheavy elements have been observed in challenging production experiments, but our present knowledge of the binding energy of these nuclides is based only on the detection of their decay products. The reconstruction from extended decay chains introduces uncertainties that render the interpretation difficult. Here we report direct mass measurements of trans-uranium nuclides. Located at the farthest tip of the actinide species on the proton number-neutron number diagram, these nuclides represent the gateway to the predicted island of stability. In particular, we have determined the mass values of (252-254)No (atomic number 102) with the Penning trap mass spectrometer SHIPTRAP. The uncertainties are of the order of 10 keV/c(2) (representing a relative precision of 0.05 p.p.m.), despite minute production rates of less than one atom per second. Our experiments advance direct mass measurements by ten atomic numbers with no loss in accuracy, and provide reliable anchor points en route to the island of stability.

[Clinical aspects, diagnosis and treatment of hypoganglionosis of the colon in adults]. / Klinika, diagnostika i lechenie gipoganglioza tolstoi kishki u vzroslykh.

Surgical treatment of chronic colonic stasis is still a complicated and difficult for solution problem. The undertaken study characterizes one of the causes of chronic constipation in adults--the hypoganglionic variant of Hirschsprung's disease whose clinical course is marked by a prolonged period of compensation while the complex diagnosis is extremely difficult. The severe disorders of the motor-evacuation function of the large intestine make surgery necessary; operation leads to recovery of 96% of patients.

Metal vapor target for precise studies of ion-atom collisions.

Although different ion-atom collisions have been studied in various contexts, precise values of cross-sections for many atomic processes were seldom obtained. One of the main uncertainties originates from the value of target densities. In this paper, we describe a unique method to measure a target density precisely with a combination of physical vapor deposition and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry. This method is preliminarily applied to a charge transfer cross-section measurement in collisions between highly charged ions and magnesium vapor. The final relative uncertainty of the target density is less than 2.5%. This enables the precise studies of atomic processes in ion-atom collisions, even though in the trial test the deduction of precise capture cross-sections was limited by other systematic errors.