Word: hydrogen
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Most pre-evolutionists agree, said Dr. Calvin, that life first appeared something like 2 billion years ago when the earth's atmosphere was dominated by hydrogen compounds such as methane, ammonia and water vapor. Such simple organic compounds as acetic acid and glycine (an amino acid) are formed in the laboratory when ultraviolet light or electric sparks pass through such mixtures. Presumably, solar ultraviolet and natural lightning would do the same in nature...
...independent system of ballistic controls that need no air. In the nose are four pairs of small jets pointing up, down, left and right (see diagram). When the pilot wants to depress the nose of his craft in near-airless space, he will shoot superheated steam (produced by catalyzed hydrogen peroxide) through the upward-pointing jets. The reaction will push the nose downward. Similar jets in the wingtips will keep the wings level or make the ship bank or roll...
Arriving at Geneva's Hotel du Rhone as one of a U.S. congressional delegation to the atoms-for-peace conference (see SCIENCE), New York's Representative Ludwig Teller checked in minutes after Physicist Edward Teller-developer of the hydrogen bomb and no kin to Ludwig -checked out. Before long, people were asking the lawmaker some pretty steep questions. "Dr. Teller," someone inquired (and the title was right, too, because Congressman Teller is a J.S.D.), "how do you transfer magnetohydrodynamic motion to plasma particles without energy depreciation?" Glibly shaking off the fallout, Democrat Teller summoned counterploys learned on Capitol...
...subcommittee also found "promising possibilities" for averting such catastrophe. The hydrogen death rate, said the subcommittee, would drop dramatically in proportion to the strength of a civil defense system of blast and fallout shelters (see chart), now virtually nonexistent. With reasonable time to evacuate, a complete shelter system might cut the death cost to 3%. Other practical steps, e.g., sheltering mothballed machine tools and moving key industrial plants underground, might help U.S. industry return to normal within a decade...
Another possibility is a rocket engine that uses nuclear fusion of heavy hydrogen instead of fission of uranium. No controlled fusion reactor has yet been constructed for any purpose, and making a light one for rockets will be much harder than making a heavy one for power stations. But the nuclear enthusiasts are not discouraged. Deuterium is cheap, they say, and even if the entire stock were shot out of the nozzle, the fuel for a flight would cost only...