Word: argonant
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...organisms that consumed oxygen as fast as green plants manufactured it. Only by some primeval accident were the greedy organisms buried in sedimentary rock (as the source of crude oil, for example), thus permitting the atmosphere to become enriched to a life-sustaining mix of 20% oxygen, plus nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide and water vapor. With miraculous precision, the mix was then maintained by plants, animals and bacteria, which used and returned the gases at equal rates. About 70% of the earth's oxygen is thus produced by ocean phytoplankton: passively floating plants. All this modulated temperatures, curbed floods...
...camera on the moon last week appeared to show only a crescent-shaped earth glowing in the lunar sky. But closer inspection showed two seemingly insignificant starlike dots of light on the night portion of the earth. They were historic dots. Each represented the light from an argon-ion laser beam aimed from Tucson, Ariz., and Wrightwood, Calif., at Surveyor's location near the lunar crater Tycho, some 240,000 miles away...
Scientists established the age of the ancient skull by using the potassium argon method of dating an overlying lava flow, which is apparently 26 million years old. The location of the skull, 300 ft. below, indicated that it was about 2,000,000 years older. Aegyptopithecus, Simons believes, "stands near the very base of the genealogical tree leading to later Great Apes and man. It represents a major stage in the documentation of the forerunners...
After detailed study, Mattox decided that all present plating methods have the same weakness: as they are applied, the atoms of plating materials do not hit the substrate hard enough. Mattox gets around this difficulty by using a chamber filled with argon gas. Inside it the piece of metal to be plated is hooked up as the cathode (negative pole) of an electrical circuit. The plating material forms the anode (positive pole). When a high-voltage direct current is passed through the circuit, positive argon ions fly across the gap and smack the substrate so hard that they blast...
...Atoms. Since argon is an inert gas, its ions do not stick. But when Mattox heats the anode, the plating material begins to evaporate. Its own ions jump the gap and stick fast to the perfectly clean substrate. The coating that results adheres as strongly as if it were part of the underlying metal...