Word: carbons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...great cyclotron at Berkeley is just barely strong enough. Dr. Eugene Gardner, 35, and Brazilian-born Dr. C.M.G. Lattes, 23, put a thin carbon target in a beam of alpha particles (helium nuclei) in the cyclotron chamber. Figuring that the alpha particles had enough power (380 million electron volts) to knock mesons out of the carbon atoms, Gardner & Lattes put a stack of special photographic plates at the spot where the mesons should hit. Then they turned on the cyclotron. When they developed the plates, they found the characteristic wavy tracks of negative mesons. Some of them ended in "stars...
Died. Ross Lockridge Jr., 33, author of the ambitious, partly successful, best-selling attempt at a Great American Novel, Raintree County; by his own hand (carbon monoxide poisoning); in Bloomington, Ind. Exhausted after seven years' work on the studied, strained, lengthy (1,066 pages) first novel that had finally brought him financial (MGM's $125,000 prize), critical and popular success, Lockridge seemed, at the time of his suicide, to be successfully weathering a nervous breakdown...
...this might suggest the existence of life. But astronomers have had no evidence that the Martian atmosphere contains the gases (carbon dioxide, nitrogen and oxygen) which are necessary for life as we know it. The necessary water might be lacking too. The "icecaps" might not be frozen water but "dry ice": solid carbon dioxide...
...Kuiper thinks that his infra-red spectrometer (a wartime development) has answered some of these questions by identifying certain gases and solids on Mars. Last autumn, he found that the atmosphere of Mars contains a small amount of carbon dioxide, which is necessary to plants (the basic living organisms). Without any carbon dioxide, plants cannot live, but too much would indicate that there are no plants on Mars to consume...
Water & Greenery. Last week, Kuiper focused his spectrometer on the gleaming icecap, dwindling fast in the Martian May. It turned out to be "water in the solid state" (ice, snow or hoarfrost). If it had been solid carbon dioxide (dry ice), it would have shown an entirely different spectrum...