Word: carbone
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Kanjorski is an unusual breed of Democrat: he votes against federal funding for most abortions, supports school prayer and opposes NAFTA. In his district, he secured a project to reclaim mine-ravaged northeastern Pennsylvania; and with Carbon County's unemployment running as high as 2% above the national average, he supports a program to offer businesses $25,000 loans for each job they create...
Skeptical eyebrows were raised in 1985 when three chemists reported that they had stumbled onto a new form of molecular carbon that they believed, but could not prove, had the shape of a soccer ball. Nobody is skeptical anymore. Not only has their theory been confirmed, but it has blossomed into a thriving branch of research. And last week that trio of chemists--Harold Kroto from Britain's University of Sussex, and Robert Curl and Richard Smalley from Rice University in Houston--were rewarded for their work with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry...
They made their serendipitous discovery by zapping graphite with a laser beam and mixing the resulting carbon vapor with a stream of helium. When they examined the crystallized residue, they found molecules made of 60 carbon atoms. Guessing (correctly) that these structures resembled Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, they named them "buckminsterfullerenes"--"buckyballs" for short...
...have long speculated that if there are other warm, wet and cozy planets like ours, they might harbor carbon-based life like ours. Unfortunately, the vast majority of places out there are depressingly and forbiddingly unearthlike. We figured that life there, if at all possible, would probably come in highly exotic forms based on completely different chemistries from ours (silicon, for example). And yet here in front of our noses are deep-sea, carbon-based microbes able to live in hellish, almost Venus-like conditions. If here, why not out there...
...underwater structures at the center of this concern are, in fact, built by live animals. Corals--fingertip- to hand-size creatures that stick together to form large colonies--use the carbon and calcium in seawater to build their hard, exterior skeletons. Over time, the stony material accumulates, giving colonies of coral their signature shapes. Some corals, for example, form big round heads that resemble a giant cauliflower, while others assume elongate shapes reminiscent of skyscrapers. As impressive as cities, mature reefs may be thousands of years old, extend for hundreds of miles and shelter thousands upon thousands of species--making...