Word: carbonization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...contest heated up again. First Chu announced in the journal Nature that a mercury-based compound could superconduct at 153 degreesK (-184 degreesF), a startling 20 degrees higher than the old standard. He got that result by subjecting the material to enormous pressure -- the sort that creates diamonds from carbon. Just a week later, a team of researchers in France and Russia reported in Science that they had hit 157 degreesK (-177 degreesF) with a similar compound. Now Chu says he has pushed the mark up to 164 degreesK (-164 degreesF), though he hasn't published this result...
...make matters worse, the impact site was covered in limestone, which vaporized into trillions of tons of carbon dioxide. It seems likely that the dinosaurs died from the global warming that resulted from this release...
Some of Horn's films, and videos of her performances, can be watched at the Guggenheim, but the main body of the show is sculpture: mechanized objects that pump liquids around, or reduce lumps of carbon to black dust with tiny pecking hammers, or swivel suspended binoculars in an anxious parody of disembodied inspection, or flap small wings. Some devices, slender granddaughters of Jean Tinguely's painting machines of the '50s, splatter paint around on the walls or (with more fetishistic suggestion) on women's shoes. No doubt to spare the clothes of the museum audience, these stay switched...
DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT CARbon fiber is? Modulus graphite? Boron? They used to put boron into gasoline, or at least into gasoline ads. Now it goes into wildly technological golf clubs and tennis racquets. Or is that argon? Or titanium? Neither of which is to be confused with something called Kevlar -- the stuff they make bullet-proof vests from. Kevlar these days is a very hot item. There are bulletproof Kevlar canoes, for example. And water skis. And bicycle tights. (A lie: the Kevlar bike tights, for the moment, are imaginary. But remember, you saw them here first.) The rest...
Harvard chemists have come up with a substance that in theory should be harder than diamond, considered the hardest substance on earth. The new synthetic material is a blend of carbon and nitrogen (diamond is all carbon), and if the researchers can make a chunk big enough and pure enough to test, they'll be able to see whether the theory is correct...