Word: carbons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Venus with eight separate unmanned spacecraft-three American and five Russian, including two Soviet landing vehicles-scientists are now certain that De Fontenelle's Eden is, in fact, more like Dante's Inferno. Its surface temperature is a hellish 900° F. Its atmosphere, consisting largely of carbon dioxide, is at least 90 times as thick as the earth's, producing crushing surface pressures of 1,500 Ibs. per sq. in. Its clouds are laden with sulfuric acid. Yet a major mystery remains: Why has a planet so like the earth in size, mass and density evolved...
Soil Scoop. On Mars, the laboratory will be served by a mechanical arm, which will reach out and scoop soil up from the surface. One small sample of soil will be dropped into a vessel containing natural Martian atmosphere. Then water vapor and carbon dioxide tagged with radioactive carbon 14 will be added. After five days of incubation under simulated Martian sunlight, the atmosphere will be removed, and the soil heated to 1160° F., hot enough to vaporize organic material. If any organism in the soil has incorporated the radioactive carbon dioxide by a process similar to terrestrial photosynthesis...
...chance that Mars may be the home of primitive living things something like bacteria, a soil sample in another chamber will be slightly moistened by a nutrient solution laced with carbon 14. The sample will be incubated, then tested to learn whether anything in the soil has consumed the nutrient and released waste gases containing the telltale carbon...
...packaging firm of Coloroll, Ltd., is producing plastic bags that will decompose naturally in five years. The secret: addition of clean, dry starch to plastic polymers. "By putting in the starch," explains Inventor Gerald J.C. Griffin, a teacher of plastics technology at Brunei University, "we are adding carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The bags will act as a carbon source for soil bacteria, breaking down into humus and carbon dioxide." Griffin's process, which can be used for most plastic products, has a powerful appeal beyond reducing long-lived litter. Because starch costs much less than polymer plastics, the process...
...left its suburbs headed toward Hollywood. In the distance a glow of huge piles of burning motion picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive, I thought, inhaling deep lungfuls of carbon monoxide... A suttee was in progress by the road side... Violet and I elbowed our way through the crowd. An enormous funeral pyre composed of thousands of feet of film and scripts drenched with Chanel Number 5 awaited the torch of Jack Holt who was to act as master of ceremonies...