Word: carbonizing
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...process was very old, set out to trace its origins. What they found was beyond even their expectations. Last year, in excavations on the western shore of Lake Victoria, they discovered the remnants of 13 furnaces nearly identical in design to the one the Haya had built. Using radioactive-carbon dating processes on the charcoal, they found that these furnaces were between 1,500 and 2,000 years old, which proved that the sophisticated steelmaking techniques demonstrated by the contemporary Haya were indeed practiced by their ancestors. This discovery, the scientists conclude, "will help to change scholarly and popular ideas...
Writing in the current issue of Science, Schmidt and Metallurgy Professor Donald Avery, both of Brown University, report that as long as 2,000 years ago, the Haya people were producing medium-carbon steel in preheated, forced-draft furnaces. A technology this sophisticated was not developed again until nearly 19 centuries later, when German-born Metallurgist Karl Wilhelm Siemens, who is generally credited with using an open-hearth furnace, produced the first high-grade carbon steel...
...years ago, at the request of the scientists and working entirely from memory, the Haya constructed a traditional furnace. It was 1.6 meters (5 ft.) high, cone-shaped, made of slag and mud and built over a pit packed with partially burned swamp grass; these charred reeds provided the carbon that combined with the molten iron ore to produce steel. Eight ceramic blowpipes, or tuyeèo a goatskin bellows outside. Using these pipes to force preheated air into the furnace, which was fueled by charcoal, the Haya were able to achieve temperatures higher than...
...sand, silt, gravel and peat that had been deposited on the bottom of the marsh over the centuries. Each break represented a sudden shift of at least a meter or two between the land masses on opposite sides of the fault-unmistakable signs of a major earthquake. Using radioactive-carbon dating techniques to determine the age of the dead organic material in the peat layers, he has now determined that the quakes occurred around A.D. 575, 665, 860, 965, 1190, 1245, 1470 and 1745. Thus the intervals between the quakes varied from 55 to 275 years, and the average interval...
...wellbeing. A key ingredient in photosynthesis-the miraculous process by which green plants grow and produce oxygen-CO2 directly or indirectly sustains all terrestrial life. Now it appears that the gas may carry the potential for trouble as well. Accumulating in the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, carbon dioxide could significantly raise global temperatures by early in the next century and dramatically alter the quality of life. With such a prospect under study, a federal official says: "We have about ten years to come up with an answer...