Word: foams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ever since housewives started dunking the family's dirty clothes and dishes in synthetic detergents, the nation's sewers have been swamped by an expanding flow of foam. Down the drainpipe, on through the sewage-disposal plant, the synthetic cleaners keep right on bubbling until contaminated rivers froth like lager beer. No matter what tricks they have tried, sanitary engineers have had small success in keeping the troublesome bubbles down. Egyptian-born Chemical Engineer Ibrahim Abdulla Eldib now insists that the best solution is to help the stuff foam...
Dribbles appear where they make sense--as foam in a rough surf, or as leaves or moss on birch trees. Scratches too fit in as the birches' smaller branches and twigs. Though frequently each spot of paint is applied with a certain amount of grossness, the composite usually reveals striking unity and conveys a powerful impression...
...wide variety of jobs requires a wide variety of electronics. The surface of the 170-lb. sphere glitters with electricity-generating solar cells. Suspended by nylon cords inside, a 20-in. aluminum canister is crammed with gadgetry. Pink plastic foam nestles around batteries, switches, sensing instruments, 1,064 transistors and 1,464 diodes. But for all the jobs that it can do, Telstar's most spectacular achievement is its radio and TV relay system. A receiver inside the canister amplifies signals received from earth 10 billion times, changes them in frequency from 6,390 to 4,170 megacycles...
...that his memories are boundless: "He knew by heart the forms of the Southern clouds on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising." Borges contrasts this world of heightened perceptions with the real world of clumsy generalizations. In Deutsches Requiem, a commandant of a Nazi concentration camp becomes an example of an overthinking man. Stifling his feelings and perceptions...
...Free Traders. Still another potential profit area lies in silvichemicals, i.e., chemicals derived from wood. One big hope: turning lignin -the noncellulose element that constitutes 25% of a tree -into derivatives ranging from ersatz foam rubber to a substitute for carbon black in tires. Says West Virginia's research-minded Chairman David Luke: "The paper industry today generates some $12 billion in sales a year. If we took advantage of wood chemicals, we could double that- and the materials would be free." Because it forced them to seek new markets, the slump from which they are now emerging...