Word: chromiumed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shaky Ground. The Russians, led by Physicist Georgy N. Flerov, last June claimed a similar achievement using another technique: firing nuclei of chromium into lead. That produced a slightly different isotope of element 106 with an even shorter half-life of less than one-hundredth of a second. The Berkeley group was highly skeptical. Said Ghiorso: "The proof they presented is marginal. I think they are on shaky ground...
...attractive. It is, in fact, a rather Vonnegutian idea. One of the fragments collected here proposes a sensibly loony scheme by which everyone in the country would get a new middle name and a lot of new relatives chosen arbitrarily by computer. The names would be words like Daffodil, Chromium, and so on, and they would signify clans. Each Daffodil would have 19,999 fellow clansmen spread out around the U.S. to be treated as relatives: to be cared for, cursed, feuded with, borrowed from, nursed, loved and hated. To be taken notice of in a human...
...oppressively high. Though American bauxite reserves are limited, there is an abundance of other clays and ores from which aluminum could be produced-at increased cost. Rising foreign prices would also make it worthwhile to dig out less accessible mineral deposits and thus open up large new reserves of chromium, copper, iron ore and other materials. Proven American reserves of lead total 36 million tons, easily enough to last through this century-and probably a lot longer-because so much lead is recycled. In addition, U.S. industry could substitute amply supplied materials for scarce ones (plastics for tin, for example...
...prize in chemistry went to Ernst Otto Fischer, 54, of Munich's Technical University and Geoffrey Wilkinson, 52, of London University's Imperial College of Science and Technology. Working independently, the two men explored organometallic compounds, a marriage of hydrocarbon compounds with metals like iron and chromium. Although such unusual combinations had long been known, it was Fischer and Wilkinson who first identified and explained the structure of a special class of organometallics, called sandwich compounds, that seemed to defy all known chemical rules. In these compounds, Fischer and Wilkinson found, the hydrocarbon molecules hold the metal atom...
...partly from uneasiness among scientists over current explanations about how life arose spontaneously on earth. Crick and Orgel note, for example, that the element molybdenum plays a key role in many enzymatic reactions that are important to life. Yet molybdenum is a rare element, much less abundant than, say, chromium or nickel -which are relatively unimportant in biochemical reactions. Thus, because the chemical composition of organisms "must reflect to some extent the composition of the environment in which they evolved," the authors suggest that earth life could have begun on a planet where molybdenum is more abundant...