Word: carbons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...direction opposite to that of the other planets, Venus has a surface that University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper says might resemble a fresh volcanic field, with boiling sulfur springs and red-hot pools of molten metals. The planet's atmosphere is no less forbidding-mostly carbon dioxide plus thick yellow clouds that may be a poisonous brew of such substances as hydrochloric acid, ammonium chloride or salts of mercury. In fact, the composition of these clouds is still a prime question for scientists. Only in the upper layers does the atmosphere even vaguely resemble that of the earth...
Young was released from Broadmoor last year despite evidence that he seems to have conducted certain interesting pharmacological "experiments" there. He was once caught growing deadly nightshade, and also taught fellow inmates how to get an easy high on tea by running carbon monoxide from a gasoline burner through it with a hose...
...organisms capable of photosynthesis-the chemical process by which green plants use the energy of sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into food and oxygen-show a marked chemical preference for carbon 12, which is the lighter of the two isotopes. As a result, the carbon in the organic compounds that make up the plants' structure consists largely of carbon 12. What is more, the greater preponderance of that isotope becomes preserved in the earth's geological records when, for example, tiny green sea plants (plankton) die, sink to the ocean bottom, gradually decompose and become part...
...South Africa's Transvaal in an unusual formation of sedimentary rock. Once probably part of a shallow ocean bottom, the stratified rock has now been thrust to the surface and scientists can easily examine it. When Schopfs team compared the relative abundance of the two principal isotopes of carbon in each of the formation's many layers, they made an intriguing discovery. In the newer layers, those formed more recently than 3.3 billion years ago, carbon 12 and carbon 13 appeared in approximately the same ratio as they do in more modern deposits known to contain the fossilized...
Chemical Choice. That sudden change in carbon ratios was highly significant to Schopf and his collaborators, Dorothy Z. Oehler of U.C.L.A. and Keith A. Kvenvolden of NASA'S Ames Research Center. In a recent report in the journal Science, they proceed to explain...