Word: clouded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cold is cold enough? Langmuir and Schaefer found by careful experiment that the motes form at -39° C. (38° F.). This explained some types of rain. Certain clouds rise high enough to be cooled to that temperature. Ice motes form, find their way into warmer parts of the cloud, where they grow into snowflakes and fall as snow or rain. "Why not help things along with some dry ice?" asked Langmuir & Schaefer...
...November 1946, Schaefer took off from Schenectady in a small airplane and directed the pilot to a fleecy cloud four miles long that was floating over nearby Massachusetts. When he reached it, he scattered into it six pounds of dry ice. Almost at once the cloud, which had been drifting along peacefully, began to writhe as if in torment. White pustules rose from its surface. In 5 minutes the whole cloud melted away, leaving a thin wraith of snow. None of the snow reached the ground (it evaporated on the way down), but the dry ice treatment had successfully broken...
Bath in the Clouds. This dramatic feat stirred up a flurry of premature rainmaking. Barnstorming pilots took off with dry ice to knock down fleecy clouds. They did not knock down much rain. For one thing, they often picked on the wrong clouds, e.g., the stratiform (layerlike) clouds, which unless very thick do not contain enough moisture to matter. And they were inclined to overdo, choking the clouds with too much dry ice. A piece of dry ice falling through a supercooled cloud creates enormous numbers of ice nuclei. Too many falling pieces of dry ice create too many nuclei...
Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History put on a little show this week to make the weariest museum trudger smile: eight plaster statuettes of fabled animals. Among them were Pegasus sitting exhausted on a cloud, Leda tête-à-tête with a Donald-Duckish swan, Brer Rabbit battling the rude Tar Baby, Androcles nursing a huge, unhappy lion, and the elastic-nebbed elephant and tenacious crocodile of Kipling's Just So Stories. What the sculptures lacked in naturalism they more than made up for in naturalness...
Claudette's wedding to Ryan is halted by a stranger who announces that she is already married. This is news to her, but it seems to be borne out by a marriage license and a cloud of witnesses. Ryan sticks loyally by, knowing that these things have a way of working themselves out. When Claudette tracks down her supposed husband, a gun goes off behind a closed door, and she is found alone with his corpse. Tried for murder, she is committed to a mental institution in a sequence that looks something like a screen test for The Snake...