Word: botanist
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Detecting explosives by the vapors they give off is based on one of the stock-in-trade techniques of the modern scientific laboratory: chromatography, an analytical tool invented 64 years ago by an obscure Russian botanist named Mikhail Semenovich Tsvett. While trying to separate certain plant pigments, Tsvett discovered that they could be differentiated easily by letting a mixture wash down the side of a column of limestone. The pigments-each sticking to the surface in a characteristic way -flowed down the stone at markedly different rates, enabling Tsvett to distinguish them from one another. Over the years, chromatography...
Woman astronauts may be a long time coming, but five women, including a Harvard botanist, will be living on the ocean floor this summer as the first woman aquanauts...
...hunting son of a prosperous Shrewsbury doctor, the young man proved a dud at school and at Cambridge. At 22, he seemed destined for what Victorians frankly called "a living" in the church. Only a chance friendship with the Rev. Professor J. S. Henslow of Cambridge, a botanist, led to Darwin's recommendation as the Beagle's naturalist. Chance, plus a certain amount of charm, determined that he hit it off immediately with the Beagle's hot-tempered Captain FitzRoy, a Tory traditionalist with a fundamentalist belief in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis...
...place is a disaster area," says University of Montana Botanist Clarence C. Gordon, who was called in with other scientists by the National Air Pollution Control Administration to study the problem. The scientists found that sulphur dioxide in the fumes kills the tips of some trees and causes others to lose their needles or grow buds in unsightly clusters...
Almost as worrisome to conservationists were the chemicals dropped from planes and boats to disperse and dissolve the slick. Botanist Michael Neushul of the University of California recalled the 1957 breakup off Baja California of the tanker Tampico, which dumped 59,000 barrels of diesel oil into the Pacific and "utterly impoverished animal life" in the area for five years. In 1967, when the Torrey Canyon-carrying crude-spilled 100,000 tons into the English Channel, 90% of the animal loss was caused by detergents used to clean up the oil. As for Santa Barbara, Neushul figures that such grazing...