Word: plastic
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...Hughes, 35, a Viet Nam veteran who serves as director of emergency services at St. Mary's Long Beach Hospital in California. "I may open a patient's chest to massage his heart, but it's the cardiac surgeon who is going to put in the plastic aorta. Our job is to keep the patient alive...
Americans discard more than 3,000,000 tons of plastic every year. Most of it ends up in local dumps, creating mountains of nonrotting, nonrusting, immortal trash. Three years ago, a team of scientists led by a University of Toronto chemist designed a plastic that would self-destruct in direct sunlight; a company in Delaware offers a kind of cellulose that dissolves in water; another in Idaho is marketing a process that makes styrene products break down into photodegradable substances. But such products have been handicapped by high costs or limited applicability...
...British Chemist Gerry Griffin, of Brunei University near London, claims that he has discovered a simple additive that will cause any plastic to decompose in the dump. Griffin will announce the discovery of what he calls "Additive X" this month at the semiannual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago. He says that the substance, mixed with plastic during the manufacturing process, is easily attacked and broken down by enzymes normally found in topsoil. When these additive particles are gone, the once glassy and impermeable plastic is left as a porous, sponge-like substance that naturally decomposes...
Billy was not the only one fascinated by the combination circus and Chautauqua lecture that last week was playing Zanesville, Ohio, a small (pop. 39,000) city on the edge of Appalachia. Many of his friends and classmates spent hours assembling and disassembling Rufus, a life-size plastic model of a human body with removable heart, lungs, kidneys and brain. Adults, meanwhile, strolled through displays devoted to family planning, sanitation and cancer detection, lined up at booths for tests to detect diabetes and lung disease and learned how to recognize incipient heart trouble...
Peter Mahoney, a friend of the defendants, saw a black attache case in a ventilation duct in the defense attorney's Tuesday. Upon further investigation, FBI agents Carl Ekblad and Robert Romann were found surrounded by a telephone receiver with alligator clips, a small set of plastic screwdrivers, a battery pack, an output transmitter, several earphones and other electronic gear...