Word: cadmium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hans Bethe--formed the heart of the bomb squad. In 1939, still officially enemy aliens, Fermi and Szilard co-invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium slugs dropped into holes in black, greasy blocks of graphite moderator, with sliding neutron-absorbing cadmium control rods to regulate the chain reaction. Fermi, still mastering English, dubbed this elegantly simple machine a "pile...
There have always been color crazes, historically brought on by mere availability. In the early 1800s, bright yellows were popularized by the introduction of chromate and cadmium pigments, a development that greatly affected the painting of J.M.W. Turner. Likewise, the Impressionists made generous use of the new blues and greens that emerged in their day. In this century, novelty gave way to marketing as manufacturers came to shape public tastes in color. In 1934, for instance, the American Tobacco Co. found that women wouldn't buy Lucky Strikes because the then green box clashed with their clothes. The solution: make...
...blue lintel and green tongue of paint in Gossip, 1994-95, are not going to tell you what the gossip was about. Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, 1984-88, commemorates a meal prepared at an art dealer's lodgings during the Venice Biennale 12 years ago, but Hodgkin's cadmium red extravaganza, with its broad serpentine shapes buttressed by planks of green, does not offer the slightest clue about the food, the company or the room...
Additional reflection reveals Smith's passion and artistry in grappling with larger social concerns. The brilliant "Fish" (1950), composed of welded steel in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, grippingly conveys the horrors of war in the nuclear age. Smith's composition, covered entirely with a cadmium red paint that is both mundane and menacing, forcefully aggregates scraps of metal and designed objects into a figure that evokes both the atom and our fear of its power. A core of barbs and chain links lies at the center of the work, surrounded by two askew rectangles of jagged metal forms...
...biggest problem here and throughout the Rockies is acidic drainage. Gold-bearing rock tends to contain large quantities of sulfur, which form sulfuric acid when exposed to air and water. The acid puts such highly toxic metals as copper and cadmium into solution, and the poisons kill aquatic life. That happened before when Henderson was mined...