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DECEMBER 1956
ELEMENT 101--"We watched with eyes fixed on a pulse recorder connected to the ionization chamber. An hour went by. The night dragged on toward dawn. The waiting seemed interminable. Then it happened! The recorder pen shot up to mid-scale and dropped back, leaving a neat red line which represented a large ionization pulse--10 times larger than would be produced by an alpha particle. No such pulse had been recorded from natural background radiation in test runs conducted for many days prior to the experiment. It looked highly probable that the pulse was indeed a signal of the hoped-for fission. The vigil continued. An hour or so later the pen recorded a second pulse like the first. We were now confident that we had witnessed the decay of two atoms of element 101--and had added a new member to the roster of chemical elements.--Albert Ghiorso and Glenn T. Seaborg" [Editors' note: Seaborg had won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for this work.]
FLEXAGONS--"Mathematics owes a lot to games, and vice versa. There is an engaging little exercise with strips of paper which has fascinated some first-class brains in recent years. It was discovered in an idle moment by a British mathematics student at Princeton University. The whole thing grew out of the trivial circumstance that British and American notebook paper are not the same size.--Martin Gardner" [Editors' note: This article was Gardner's first of numerous contributions to this magazine, all of which are now available on the CD-ROM "Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games."]