Word: carbonates
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Whether she is jitterbugging with gangling Roy Lester (see cut), her "waltzing mouse," or paying off an insistent suitor ("Listen, tall, dark and bad-mannered!"), Maisie The Taxi Dancer is delightful to look at. One part Jean Harlow, one part Mae West, she is an honest and fetching carbon copy of a type of U.S. female to be found at Coney Island on any hot summer Sunday...
...what goes in and what comes out. The mystery is how the transmutation is achieved. The classic explanation, commonly accepted until recently, was proposed in 1870 by Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer, and amplified by Nobel Prizeman Richard Willstütter of Munich: Under the influence of chlorophyll, carbon dioxide and water combine to form formaldehyde (CH 2 O) and free oxygen. Then, under the influence of light, six formaldehyde molecules somehow assemble into one glucose molecule...
...There was no way of telling them apart. So Ruben obtained heavy oxygen-a rare isotope which has a mass of 18 instead of the normal atomic weight of 16-and made from it heavy-oxygen water. This was fed to a green plant, together with ordinary, light-oxygen carbon dioxide. As photosynthesis proceeded, the scientists caught the freed oxygen, found it was the heavy variety. Next they fed the plant light-oxygen water and heavy-oxygen carbon dioxide. All the oxygen thus freed was light. So it was proved that all the free oxygen comes directly from the water...
...similar "tracer" experiment, Ruben & Co. introduced radioactive carbon into plants (TIME, June 23), were later unable to find any radioactive formaldehyde in them. (Formaldehyde is poisonous to plants, anyway.) This was another blow to the old theory...
Baly records some curious experiments. In his laboratory in 1928 he achieved the photosynthesis of formaldehyde, glucose, starch, other organic compounds in a test-tube solution of carbon dioxide. As a catalyst he used nickel carbonate instead of chlorophyll (which no chemist has yet got to work outside the veins of plants). But neither Baly nor any other chemist, using identical methods, has ever succeeded in repeating the experiment...