Word: crude
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...commercial exploitation of crude oil has been among the most liberating technologies the world has ever known. When pumped though an internal combustion engine stuck in a metal box, refined oil has given freedom of movement to billions. Before the automobile, the life experiences of most of those who lived in the rich world were limited - as in much of the poor world they remain - to neighborhood and family. When shot through gas turbines on wings, oil has shrunk the planet in a way that was once the stuff of science fiction. Neither of my parents ever flew; both...
...benzodiazepines, sedatives usually prescribed for insomnia and anxiety, topping up whatever heroin she could find: "I used to mix them with smack, take five pills with a hit. The next day I'd be completely blank about what I'd been doing." Some of her friends tried the same crude cocktail, while others began experimenting with stimulants, especially ice, the potent crystallized form of methamphetamine. When the heroin started trickling back, they didn't return...
...Indeed, when it comes to oil, Asia faces a peculiar conundrum?a kind of macroeconomic China Syndrome. Vigorous mainland growth is great for regional trade, but China's outsized appetite has also driven up global commodity prices, including for crude. China, which is expected to consume 6.3 million barrels of oil per day in 2004, surpassed Japan last year to become the world's second-biggest oil guzzler (trailing only the U.S.). China "is emerging as one of the most decisive factors" in global energy markets, according to a June report published by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a U.S.-based...
...With luck, relief might be on the way. White, the Asia strategist for Merrill Lynch, expects crude to fall to about $35 per barrel, easing the pressure on regional economies. He sees Asia's GDP growth contracting from about 7% this year to just under 6% in 2005?still an eminently respectable performance. But in a world kept constantly on edge by terrorism, the threat of a price shock triggered by a spectacular attack on energy infrastructure or by further instability in the Middle East can't be dismissed. Says the foreign executive at the Guangdong power plant...
...researchers could collect a better helping of such ancient stuff, that would go a long way toward explaining how the crude materials that constituted the early solar system developed into the discrete planets that exist today. For 27 months of its three-year mission, Genesis trolled through space beyond the orbit of the moon, gathering solar wind on five 4-in. hexagonal collector plates--each coated with silicon, gold, sapphire or diamond--and then stowing them back inside the body of the spacecraft. What's there could be a cosmic treasure: "A billion billion molecules for us to study," says...