• The Fayetteville Meteorite landed near Fayetteville, Arkansas on 26 Dec 1934, two years before Manuel's birth, when Kazuo Kuroda was a 17-year old student in Tokyo. Analysis would later reveal that this meteorite contained more neon from the Sun than any other meteorite. After a 28-year interval that included Manuel's birth and World War II, Professor "Paul" Kazuo Kuroda of the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville would give the meteorite to Manuel for study as part of his PhD research. Analysis of this meteorite provided early evidence that neon's atoms had somehow been sorted by mass.

    “Noble gases in the Fayetteville meteorite”, Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 31 (1967) 2413-2431
 
  • Nobel Laureate Francis William Aston, who developed the modern mass spectrometer and expressed atomic masses in terms of nuclear packing fraction, or potential energy per nucleon, visited Japan in 1936 to watch a solar eclipse . Aston gave a special lecture at the University of Tokyo , attended by an unusually talented 19-year old student named Kazuo Kuroda. That lecture inspired Kuroda to study nuclear and stable isotope geochemistry. Much earlier, Aston reported in 1913 that neon might contain atoms of different mass (isotopes), becasue neon had a lighter atomic weight after diffusing through the walls of clay pipe.

    “A new elementary constituent of the atmosphere”, British Association for the Advancement of Science Reports 82 (1913) 403.
    [Fifty-six years later, neon of light atomic weight was found in solar-wind gases implanted in Moon samples returned by the first Apollo Mission.]
    “Preliminary examination of lunar samples from Apollo 11” Science 165 (1969) 1211-1227.
 

  • Paul K. Kuroda reached out to a rebellious new graduate student who had been alienated from academic graduate research in 1960 and demonstrated by his own example the joy and fulfillment of scientific inquiry. Kuroda provided a intellectual link to Nobel Laureate Francis William Aston's interest in nuclear energy, isotope abundance measurements, and the Sun. The Fayetteville meteorite that Kuroda gave Manuel to analyze for his PhD research provided a physical link to Aston's studies. Years after introducing Manuel to the exciting field of nuclear isotope geo-chemistry and supervising his PhD research, Kuroda and Manuel co-authored a landmark paper on empirical evidence that isotopes of neon and xenon in meteorites had been sorted by a common mass fractionation process.

    “Mass fractionation and isotope anomalies in neon and xenon”, Nature 227 (1970) 1113-1116.

 
  • Stuart Symington , US Senator from Missouri and the first Secretary of the US Air Force, a talented public servant of strong courage and moral convictions encouraged Manuel to apply for lunar samples and funds from NASA in 1971 [NGR 26-003-057] to check out evidence of unusual spallation krypton in lunar soils. The findings by Manuel and co-workers revealed that major differences in the isotopic compositions of noble gases in various parts of the solar system could be explained by sorting atoms by mass and that mass-fractionation alone could explain the “strange” spallogenic krypton reported earlier in dirt from the Moon.

    “A comparison of noble gases released from lunar fines (#15601.64) with noble gases in meteorites and in the earth”, Proc. 3 rd Lunar Sci. Conf., Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta, Sup. 3 , vol 2 (1972) 1927-1945.
 
 
  • Raymond L. Bisplinghoff , UMR Chancellor, encouraged Manuel and Sabu in 1976 to publish their disagreement with scientists from the University of Chicago on the origin of “strange” xenon in meteorites. The super-heavy element fission hypothesis was popular until this debate was published in the January 1977 issue of Science.
    http://web.umr.edu/~om/archive/StrangeXenon.pdf
 
  • Stig E. Friberg came from the Swedish Institute of Physical Chemistry in 1976 to become Chairman of UMR's Department of Chemistry. He encouraged Manuel to remain true to the experimental observations, despite all the brickbats and catcalls from authorities that “knew” the Sun's internal composition and how the Sun formed. Decades later, Friberg and Manuel co-authored a paper on the internal composition of the Sun.
    http://web.umr.edu/~om/abstracts/gong-2002.pdf
 
  • Daniel S. Goldin, NASA Administrator, ordered the public release of mass spectrometric data on 7 Jan. 1998 from the Galileo probe that entered Jupiter in late 1995. That event, recorded by C-SPAN News, made it possible to check the validity of a 1983 prediction that Jupiter would contain “strange” xenon, with excess Xe-136 made by rapid neutron capture in a supernova explosion. The 1983 prediction, the 1988 release of data, and the findings are referenced below.
    http://web.umr.edu/~om/archive/SolarAbundances.pdf (See test #3, page 13)
    C-SPAN tape 98-01-07-22-1, Purdue U. Public Affairs Video Archives, # 98526
    http://web.umr.edu/~om/abstracts2001/windleranalysis.pdf
 
 
  • Gary Thomas, UMR Chancellor since 2000, encouraged Manuel to go to the 2002 SOHO/GONG Conference on Helioseismology and present experimental evidence that the interior of the Sun is actually iron-rich. That paper, co-authored by Stig Friberg, was published in the Conference Proceedings.

    http://web.umr.edu/~om/abstracts/gong-2002.pdf
 
  • Barry W. Ninham of the Australian National University was one of the first to recognize the importance of magnetic fields in astrophysical systems in 1963. Forty years later, Ninham joined Friberg and Manuel in co-authoring a paper on the origin of solar magnetic fields and their role in solar eruptions, climate, and the acceleration of protons upward from the solar core.

    http://web.umr.edu/~om/abstracts2003/jfe-superfluidity.pdf