Word: acidic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...future seems to be closing down, to be darkening? If nature, first an enemy to be subdued and then a resource to be exploited, is now an endangered victim of technology? The classic American salvation (clear the land! build! disembowel the mountains!) threatens to invert to damnation. Acid rain pelts the Adirondacks, destroying their fish. Smog blows east from the Pacific Coast and eats the vegetation off the Sierras. The Love Canal and Three Mile Island and Kepone in the Tidewater all make mothers anxious in their genes. The once almighty dollar shrivels. Productivity dips to zero, and the national...
Other researchers are concentrating on unraveling IF's molecular structure. Caltech scientists are working with a "sequencing" machine that needs as little as ten picomoles (less than a millionth of a gram) of pure IF to determine the composition and sequence of the IF molecule's amino acid chain, which consists of about 150 links. Explains Molecular Geneticist Leroy Hood: "It's like having pearls of different colors on a string and clipping them off one by one and identifying the color of each...
...Caltech researchers have sequenced 40 of fibroblast interferon's amino acid "pearls." When the structure of the chain is fully determined, which it probably will be before the end of 1980, chemists will try to re-create IF in the laboratory. That promises to be a difficult task: so long a chain tends to break apart in synthesis. But if they succeed, pharmaceutical companies may some day be able to mass-produce this and other types of interferon using only off-the-shelf chemicals...
...Acid precipitation is apparently caused largely by sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants, smelters and factories. To a lesser extent, nitrogen oxides from car exhausts and industry contribute to the problem. Rising high into the sky and borne hundreds of miles by winds, these chemicals mix and react with water vapor to form sulfuric and nitric acids. The acids then fall to earth in the form of rain or snow that can damage anything from monuments to living organisms. After a number of such rain showers or highly acidic snow melts, a lake's pH* can plunge...
...lakes. In some areas, humans may also be affected. In the Lac la Croix lake system of Ontario, where the Ojibway Indians fish for their livelihood, catches are showing high levels of mercury. Reason: the toxic metal, ordinarily concentrated in sediment, changes into an organic form, methyl mercury, in acid water and is then easily absorbed by the fish. While the threat to plants is not as well understood, acid rain can eat away at leaves, leach nutrients from the soil, interfere with photosynthesis, and affect the nitrogen-fixing capabilities of such plants as peas and soybeans. Scandinavian scientists claim...