Word: chemist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Conant's other contributions were equally impressive. He was a chemist of some note and during his tenure as Harvard president served as a science advisor to the government, working on the atomic bomb project. In 1953 he resigned as Harvard president to become High Commissioner to the German Republic, and shortly thereafter took over as our first post-war ambassador to that country. During his later years, Conant was to have a profound influence on public-school education, publishing a series of recommendations that have affected the direction it has taken...
Ever felt tempted on a snowy day to throw back your head and drink in some of those pure white flakes? Try to resist the impulse. After testing samples of snow from several Kansas City areas, Research Chemist David Roberts, a specialist in heavy-metal poisoning, discovered amounts of lead that measured six times the level specified in the Environmental Protection Agency's clean-water standards. Even water from the polluted Kansas River proved less leaden than the snow. According to Roberts, car exhausts and factories are spewing into the environment 1,000 times the natural level of lead...
...point they enlisted 58 scientists to discuss what was unknown in their fields. The co-editors quickly discovered that "the more eminent they were, the more ready to run to us with their ignorance." Some of the contributors are indeed eminent: Molecular Biologists Francis Crick and Sir John Kendrew. Chemist Linus Pauling (all Nobel laureates), Anthropologist Donald Johanson, Astronomers Sir Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Physicist John Wheeler. The conundrums they pose are also notable. How did the universe come into being? Why do we sleep? How are galaxies formed? What is consciousness? Why does a species become extinct...
...Chemist Willard Libby. This was followed by the invention of the potassium-argon method. Both gave scientists techniques by which they could accurately determine the age of the strata in which fossilized bones were found, and sometimes the age of the bones themselves. Using these new tools, they have determined that Java man and Peking man, now classified as Homo erectus, walked the earth more than 500,000 years...
Died. Louis Frederick Fieser, 78, the Harvard organic chemist who first synthesized the blood-clotting agent vitamin K and developed combat napalm; in Cambridge, Mass. His research into the chemical reactions involved in cancer-a disease the cigarette-smoking Fieser himself contracted-won him numerous awards. About his work with napalm, the gasoline-derivative jelly first used in World War II and then extensively in Viet Nam, Fieser once declared: "I'd do it again, if called upon, in defense of the country...