Word: ammonias
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...student at the University of South Florida, he took an $8.50-an-hour lab-assistant job to help pay his tuition. He was assigned to a $20,000 project contracted by a subsidiary of Florida Progress, a local power company, to determine if bacteria can be used to extract ammonia from clinoptilolite, a clay used in filtering water. The clay, similar to Kitty Litter, absorbs ammonia from water and can be cleaned and used over and over...
Unfortunately, the clay also absorbs calcium, and in the cleaning process used by the power company, the calcium forms a sludge that clogs the machinery. If bacteria were used for the cleanup, the company reasoned, only the ammonia would be extracted, and the problem would be solved...
...that temperature, Taborsky concluded, the small pockets in the clay that absorb calcium close down while the ones that accept ammonia remain open. By spring 1988, he had gathered enough data to make his case to Carnahan and a Florida Progress representative, who told him that his idea could be "worth millions...
...vinegar in a stellar cloud 25,000 light years from earth, a discovery that may help explain the formation of life. Radio astronomers from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, found faint traces of vinegar, or acetic acid, in a cloud of gas and dust named Sagittarius B2 North. Ammonia was discovered in interstellar space more than 25 years ago, which makes it plausible, according to one of the scientists on the Illinois team, that molecules of ammonia and acetic acid linked up to form basic amino acid. Amino acids, which are the basic building blocks of life, form...
...pieces of extraterrestrial real estate. The first, a planet orbiting a star known as 47 Ursae Majoris, 200 trillion miles from Earth in the Big Dipper, is about twice the size of Jupiter. Like our own largest planet, it probably consists mostly of such noxious gases as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and methane. Fierce jet streams blow unceasingly at hundreds of miles per hour, sometimes spiraling into mammoth hurricanes that last for centuries and are big enough to swallow the Earth. And if this harsh world has any solid surface at all, it's buried under an atmosphere thousands of miles...