Word: carbonic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...members of a vast chemical family known as hydrocarbons, compounds composed of hydrogen and carbon entwined in complex and varying arrays. As it turns out, living creatures contain considerable stores of both elements. Putting two and two together, geologists have long assumed that when living organisms die, heat, light and bacteria begin to degrade the constituent compounds. That organic material then collects in sedimentary layers in the sea and is buried progressively deeper. After millions of years, pressure and temperature convert the debris into fossil fuels. Yet little hard evidence supports this conventional wisdom. Declares Tore Lindbo, Swedish Power Board...
...astronomer, Gold approached the puzzle with a fresh perspective. He knew that carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the solar system, appearing in planets, asteroids, meteors and comets, often in the form of hydrocarbons. Gold believes that when the primordial gaseous swirl condensed into the sun and its satellites, large amounts of hydrocarbons settled in the earth's interior. Some of those compounds seeped upward into porous rocks and sediments, says Gold, and became such accessible pockets of riches as the oil fields of the Arabian Peninsula. He predicts that if greater depths were mined, fuel reserves...
Today many Soviet weapons are reasonable facsimiles if not exact duplicates of American ones. The Soviet AWACS and space shuttles are carbon copies of earlier U.S. models. The Boeing short takeoff and landing (STOL) prototype, a breakthrough aerodynamic design, miraculously appeared just 16 months later as the Soviet AN-72. The SU-15 fighter that shot down the Korean Air Line's Flight 007 two years ago did so with a missile guidance system designed in the U.S. The Soviets do not even attempt to create their own computers anymore: the Kremlin's mainframe RIAD computer...
What is more, the restless tectonic plates spawn volcanic eruptions, which spew carbon dioxide into the air. The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide results in a greenhouse effect, which traps the sun's energy, causing temperatures on land and in the sea to rise markedly. Conversely, crustal movement may allow frigid ocean currents from the poles to invade tropical waters, leading to a worldwide drop in temperatures. Those species that cannot adapt to the earth's erratic behavior simply succumb. To many paleontologists, as well as geologists, it seemed to make sense...
DIED. Cornelis Bernardus van Niel, 87, pioneering Dutch-born microbiologist who in the 1930s formulated the first correct chemical theory of photosynthesis, the all important process by which green plants convert water, carbon dioxide and light energy into carbohydrates and oxygen; in Carmel, Calif. At Stanford University, Van Niel worked with bacteria, some of which also perform a kind of photosynthesis, to derive his own general equation; in the 1940s experiments using isotopes of oxygen with different atomic weights traced the course of the chemical reactions and proved he was correct about green plants as well...