Word: boron
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Fortunately, nature has provided a chemical element, boron, which can be forced with some difficulty to improve on carbon's performance. Boron has a high heat of combustion (25,000 B.T.U. per lb.), and it forms compounds that contain more energy-rich hydrogen than most hydrocarbons do. The heat of combustion of diborane (B2H6), for instance, is 31,000 B.T.U. per lb., almost twice as good as kerosene...
...EXOTIC" FUELS for jet planes and missiles will be turned out by new industry. Gallery Chemical Co. started work on a $38 million plant at Muskogee, Okla. to produce "HiCal" for Navy from boron. Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp. won $33,005,000 Air Force contract for a new high-energy chemical-fuel plant near Niagara Falls. In addition to stepping up range and speed of present missiles and jets, new fuels will make possible radical new top-secret Air Force chemical bomber, for which North American and Boeing have design contracts...
...silicon in the battery is first grown in pure crystals, cut into strips, then impregnated to a depth of only one ten-thousandth of an inch with minor impurities. The top surface is treated with boron, whose atom has one less electron in its outer shell than silicon has; the bottom layer is treated with arsenic, whose atom has one more electron in its outer shell than silicon has. When light strikes near the junction of the two layers, it pushes electrons to the bottom surface, pulls "holes" (electronless gaps) to the top surface, creating a difference in voltage...
...tiny quantities. Scales big enough to handle good-sized samples are not nearly as sensitive. Last week Dr. Alsoph H. Corwin of Johns Hopkins University told about a scale that he has developed which is both strong and sensitive. Its beam teeters on a finely polished knife edge of boron carbide (almost as hard as diamond), resting on the same material. The edge is so sharp that the pressure on its minute bearing surface is 25,000 Ibs. per sq. in. It must be handled with extraordinary care to keep this great force from blunting it. The scale will weigh...
...When the boron had soaked through the woman's system, including the brain tumor that was killing her, the doctors placed her head near Brookhaven's high-flux pile. While the doctors watched from a platform, the pile operator threw the controls and a stream of neutrons from the pile shot through her skull, aimed at the tumor site. For 17 minutes the boron in the tumor was turned, atom by atom, into a source of instantaneous alpha radiation...