Word: hydrogen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan introduced Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and visionary of Star Wars, to Gorbachev, whose response was so minimal that Reagan thought he had not heard the name. "This is the famous Dr. Teller," said the President. "There are many Dr. Tellers," replied Gorbachev coolly, seemingly haunted by his dissident H-bomb scientist Andrei Sakharov...
...five years after it leaves the ground, N2O may finally reach altitudes of 15 miles and above, where it is broken apart by the same ultraviolet radiation that creates ozone. The resulting fragments -- called radicals -- attack and destroy more ozone molecules. Another ozone killer is methane, a carbon-hydrogen compound produced by microbes in swamps, rice paddies and the intestines of sheep, cattle and termites...
...folks in Rawhide Village, a subdivision near Gillette, Wyo., figured something was amiss back in February when they found they could set fire to cracks in the street. Methane, it developed, was surfacing from coal deposits below. So was stinking -- and sickening -- hydrogen sulfide. By this month, with the hydrogen sulfide causing illnesses and the methane turning into a serious fire hazard, the Campbell County commission ordered some 180 families to evacuate by July 31. "Unlike a disaster such as a flood, you can't see it," says County Commissioner Tom Ostlund, who is seeking federal disaster funds...
Quinta seems, from terrestrial observations, a promising target, and getting there is half of Lem's fun. The Eurydice is constructed in orbit around a moon of Saturn; its thermonuclear flowstream engines use hydrogen intake as fuel and can achieve a velocity of 99% the speed of light. While the scout ship Hermes, weighing a mere 180,000 tons, is sent off to reconnoiter Quinta, the Eurydice lingers in the vicinity of a black hole. When Hermes returns, the mother ship will execute an "incomprehensible maneuver called 'passage through a retrochronal toroid,' thanks to which she would reappear...
...core contracts, however, its internal pressures will rise, forcing the temperature rapidly back up again until the intense heat ignites the unfused hydrogen gas surrounding the core. The interior of the sun will now be hotter than ever, a dense core of incandescent helium surrounded by a thin shell of hot, fusing hydrogen. Over the next few hundred million years, heat from the core will drive surface layers of the sun so far outward that they will cool to about two-thirds of the current 6,000 degrees C surface temperature, and redden. The sun will have become...