Word: alloy
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Since the 19th century, science and industry have honored a holy of holies: a bar of platinum-iridium alloy, triple-locked in a subbasement at Sèvres on the outskirts of Paris. Near the ends of the bar were engraved two microscopically thin lines, and the distance between them was exactly one meter-by international agreement, the world standard of measurement. Around the globe, other countries had copies of the bar at Sèvres, and their traditional units of length-feet (3.28 to a meter), versts, li, or whatever -were defined by reference to it. But last week...
...drop of water, the features of the Soviet way of life are reflected." The youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda took lyric flight: "Through the stormy night, battling in Stygian darkness across the thundering ocean, four simple Soviet lads bore aloft the torch of bravery. Soviet people are a special alloy!" One Russian correspondent breathlessly reported that not once during their ordeal had any of the four said a harsh word to another. Pravda could not resist contrasting this with the despair, terror, "fears and sorrowful prayers" left behind in the diary of the missing World War II U.S. bomber crew whose...
...ways. Some look good on paper but turn out to be impractical in actual use. In its effort to develop low-cost nuclear power, the Atomic Energy Commission has long experimented at such places as Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, with new liquid reactor fuels-a low-melting alloy of U-233 and bismuth, a solution of uranyl sulfate, and others. But AEC soon discovered that the program was leading only to prohibitively expensive means of obtaining competitive electrical energy, and last week it announced a shift in emphasis: funds for the Brookhaven liquid-fuel project and similar ones...
Blough is an alloy composed of shyness (he is still not well known in the steel industry on a personal basis), unpretentiousness and Pennsylvania Dutch stubbornness. He likes to sing hymns and old folk songs, browse in art galleries, cook in the old-fashioned kitchen of the Victorian, Hawley, Pa. house where he and his wife spend their weekends. He has two married twin daughters. He has the temperament and patience of an experienced trout caster (which he is), the fascination for things mechanical of an engineer (which he is not). He rarely goes on vacation, but likes to stroll...
Watching workers hammering at the panels, Khrushchev picked up one of their discarded rivets, pondered its alloy, and pocketed it with a sly smile: "Look, I am stealing this. I think the United States can afford the loss of one rivet." Then he moved on, admiring the cut of a worker's quilted nylon and Fiberglas jacket, watching how it zipped. "Very practical. I like the cut," he grinned. "We must get the pattern-or, if not, borrow this...