Word: carbonations
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Each day the plant collects 900 tons of manure, at $1 a ton, from nearby feedlots. The odoriferous, carbon-rich stuff is dried for two to three months under the hot Imperial Valley sun before it is burned at 1500 degrees F to power the plant's steam turbines. Not one to waste a thing, Parish, 36, eventually hopes to sell the ash left over from the process for possible use in road building or absorbing toxic wastes. Although Mesquite Lake has not yet shown a profit, Parish is already planning a second alternative-energy plant -- to burn crop wastes...
Guns add a dimension of harsh finality to suicide attempts. Psychologists find that most people who attempt to kill themselves do not really wish to die. Many suicide methods, including drugs, carbon monoxide poisoning from car exhausts or simply swimming away from a shore, allow people to change their mind or to be discovered and rescued. According to some experts, for each successful suicide, there are at least 20 attempts. But one study has found that when people use a gun, the rate of death is 92%. Says Tulane University sociologist James Wright: "Everyone knows that...
...trees go, millions of different animal and plant species will become extinct, and the information encoded in their genes will be lost forever. Moreover, deforestation can lead to local disruptions of rainfall patterns and possibly even global climate changes because there would be fewer trees to absorb carbon dioxide from...
Analyzing tree-ring data from 5,000-year-old living bristlecone pines and even older dead ones, Eddy reported in 1976 that their carbon-14 content seemed to vary in rhythm with sunspot numbers. When sunspots were rare, as they were during the Maunder minimum, the amount of carbon 14 in the tree rings increased markedly; when they were numerous, the amount decreased. The explanation: during the sun's more active periods, its magnetic field, which ordinarily deflects some cosmic rays away from the earth, expands and becomes an even greater barrier to the rays. As a result, less carbon...
Eddy's tree-ring data revealed other 50-to-100-year intervals in the past when carbon-14 production was high and the sun apparently quiescent. But did this mean that all of these periods were times of extreme cold? Many scientists doubted it, suggesting that the correlation between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age might be nothing more than sheer coincidence. Changes in solar cyclic activity, the doubters argued, were not necessarily accompanied by variations in the sun's output of heat and light and probably did not affect terrestrial weather and climate...