Word: carbone
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Ordinary chemical reactions are totally inadequate to explain stellar energy. Even if the sun were composed entirely of coal (carbon) and the right amount of oxygen to burn it, the energy of that combustion could supply the sun's heat for a mere 2,500 years. Helmholtz' old theory that the energy comes from contraction of the sun's mass (in effect from the falling inward of all its matter) is also inadequate because it would explain only 30 million years of sunniness. Even radioactivity, the spontaneous disintegration of atoms such as uranium and radium, will...
...formation of helium from hydrogen is theoretical. It has not been done in the laboratory. It is also complex, involves six steps in which carbon atoms participate but are finally released unchanged. But it is the only theory which accounts for the sun. Further, it accounts for the energy of all the stars except the relatively cool "red giants." A star, in keeping with Bethe's theories on the sun, apparently gets hotter and brighter, "behaves very foolishly" toward the end, uses up the last of its fuel supply in a burst of glory and a "brilliant death...
Typical is the situation with ersatz motor fuel. Most of the synthetic gasoline made from coal, plus the conquered Rumanian oil, has been invested in the Caucasus campaign for more oil. Meanwhile wartime traffic limps on carbon monoxide made in portable charcoal burners (TIME, Sept. 7). Last week a new ersatz fuel appeared in the news: liquefied methane gas in pressure tanks. This fuel is obtained by "bottling" natural gas in Italy, Hungary and Denmark, and also as a byproduct in the production of gasoline from coal. Recently Berlin Gasworks Co. prepared to extract methane from the city gas supply...
...Pittsburgh Corning Corp., is utterly unlike ordinary glass. It not only floats but is black in color, opaque, weighs about one-fifteenth as much as ordinary glass and can easily be sawed, drilled or shaped without chipping or shattering. To make it, glass is finely crushed and heated with carbon dust in a furnace. The molten mass rises and swells like dough as gas from the carbon froths up the melting glass into a foam which later cools and hardens while still keeping its foam structure. Waterproof, ratproof, rotproof, heat-resistant-Foamglas is finding its first big industrial...
...grow fat. This announcement from the University of Wisconsin last week concluded its five-year study of the nutritive value of synthetic urea, opened a new era in feeds, perhaps in foods. Urea is a reasonably priced, simple nitrogen compound made chemically from nothing more than ammonia and carbon dioxide. Not a protein, synthetic urea is so closely related to protein that it can replace a major part of the vegetable proteins in cattle feed. Urea is manufactured in large quantity for use in many types of plastics and as a rich fertilizer. Caution: Urea is not digestible by farm...