Word: acidity
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...acrid, sticky evergreen that thrives in millions of acres of drought-stricken wasteland. Last winter, using a distilling apparatus made from junkheap parts, Duisberg showed how to turn the hardy bush into a palatable stock feed.* With one byproduct already available to increase the margin of profit (nordihydroguaiaretic acid, a fat preservative that brings $35 a lb.), he managed to develop another: a quick-drying varnish that is almost certain to be salable. Other promising plants on Duisberg's list...
...most commonly used methods for freeing fossils are risky. Acid, for instance, dissolves limestone, but it also destroys many types of fossils. Some grades of stone can be scaled away with the flame of a blow torch, but this method is limited and difficult. Other stones, heated and then dipped in cold water, sometimes crack away from the fossils they contain. Too often, the rapid change of temperature shatters the fossil as well as the stone...
...majors, for all their fame as fresh-air lovers, spend an appalling amount of time in dank laboratories. Here they rub pebbles on porcelain streak plates, peer at crystals through dime-sized hand lenses, and drip hydrochloric acid on helpless limestones...
Untiring, acid-tongued Rudolph Halley, the committee's chief counsel and inquisitor, began digging into the ex-mayor's past. There was O'Dwyer's story that his only business with Gangster Frank Costello had been a visit to Costello's apartment in 1942 in the course of an investigation O'Dwyer was conducting as an Army officer. Why did the leader of Tammany Hall and other important New York political figures happen to be there at the same time? O'Dwyer had no idea-it was just coincidence...
...late 1860s, two things were sure to make San Franciscans sit up and take notice. One was easy gold, the other an acid writing man named Ambrose Bierce. The easy gold was usually illusory, but Bierce went on tapping a virgin lode of venom that lasted 40-odd years...