Word: acidity
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...fish in about a hundred lakes in New York's Adirondack wilderness. It has pelted the slopes of the Rockies, and has already affected Scandinavia and much of industrialized Western Europe and Japan. It is a newly recognized and increasingly harmful kind of pollution, invisible and insidious: acid rain, a corrosive precipitation that actually consists of weak solutions of sulfuric and nitric acids...
Last November 35 nations, including the U.S., gathered in Geneva and signed a pact pledging to work together against this skyborne peril. President Carter has authorized a $10 million annual outlay for a ten-year research program on acid rain, which he considers one of the two gravest environmental threats of the decade (the other: increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels...
...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...
...court's crusty, most independent Ioner and liberal completed a long memoir of the nearly 37 years he had spent on the bench. Early reports are that the forthcoming book, which is due from Random House this fall, shows that Douglas was bold in setting down his often acid-etched opinions of the court and his colleagues. A former law clerk of Douglas' who has seen the early drafts describes some of the Justice's comments about his brethren as "incredibly nasty. They read like something that Alice Roosevelt Longworth would have written...
DIED. William H. Stein, 68, American biochemist who shared a 1972 Nobel Prize with a Rockefeller University colleague, Stanford Moore, for unraveling the chemical composition of ribonuclease, an enzyme that, with 124 amino acid components, was twice as complex as any previously analyzed protein; of polyneuritis, a polio-like disease that had crippled him since 1969; in New York City...