Word: phosphorus
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Most artificial smokes, Miss Raskin explained, are made of fairly heavy materials such as phosphorus pentoxide or petroleum oils. Even if their particles are only one micron (one twenty-five thousandth of an inch) in diameter, they fall through air at about eight inches per hour, which she considers too fast. Backed by the Air Force, Miss Raskin discovered a way to fluff various kinds of plastic into spherical particles that are mostly empty cells and almost as light as air. Miss Raskin's particles can be colored, and they fall 1,250 times slower than solid smoke particles...
...Several stars or star clusters showing inexplicably wide deviations in their chemical composition. In some cases, they varied vastly in the amount of lithium and beryllium they contained, and one star (3 Centauri A) contained 100 times more phosphorus than the sun. The discovery poses the still unanswered question: Why do stars have such different contents if, as is generally supposed, they were all formed by similar processes...
...stumble and fall into unemployment." Greatly increased yields can be obtained by such simple devices as an improved plow, which could be drawn by a bullock, or by increased use of fertilizer. "Just as most people are starved for food, most crops are starved of essential elements-nitro gen, phosphorus and potassium." Though production of nitrogen fertilizer has now reached 10 million tons a year, it "still ranks as one of the most underexploited discoveries of all time." Concluded Britain's Physicist P.M.S. Blackett: "We as scientists and technologists, have already given ourselves the tools by means of which...
...University researchers fed the problem to an IBM 650 electronic computer, last week reported the answer: 21? a day. Caring nothing for variety or any other of life's spices, the computer solemnly accepted the facts that a man must have certain minimum quantities of protein, calcium, iron, phosphorus and five vitamins. Then its nerve cells went to work, concluded that only four foods are needed to sustain life: lard, beef liver, orange juice and soybean meal...
...moving parts, the thermocouple is theoretically an ideal way to generate electricity. Catch has been that most suitable materials cannot stand the high temperatures needed to generate thermoelectric power on a large scale. By combining indium (a soft, silvery metal used in dental alloys) with arsenic and phosphorus, the Westinghouse researchers developed a new chemical compound that performed thermoelectrically at temperatures between 850° F. and 1,500° F., achieved an estimated 10% efficiency. Compared to the 40% efficiency of the biggest electric generators now in operation, this is not sensational. But future development may close the gap, make...