Word: hydrogen
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...that burn when brought in contact with water, e.g., metallic potassium, sodium, white phosphorus, various metallic hydrides. Some of these can be used in convenient liquid form. When such fuels hit water, they decompose it violently by uniting with its oxygen, giving off heat and a large volume of hydrogen gas. The combustion chamber is shaped so as to make the expanding water-and-gas mixture shoot out the rear opening as a high-speed jet. The reaction from this drives the engine (and the torpedo) forward...
...nonvolatile compounds in food are tasted; the volatile ones are both tasted and smelled. But why they taste or smell the way they do is still unknown. The chemical characteristics of a compound may have little to do with its taste. Cane sugar (sucrose) contains only carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, but it tastes much like saccharin, whose quite different molecule has nitrogen and sulphur atoms...
Made of thin Neoprene latex (synthetic rubber), the balloon was about 17 feet in diameter while on the ground. It was partially inflated with hydrogen, which expanded it into a sphere only when it reached 35,000 feet. Rising still higher, the balloon stretched itself to 75 feet in diameter before it finally burst...
Three drug-manufacturing firms (Squibb, Merck, Parke-Davis), experimenting with variations on streptomycin, found a complex chemical answer: dihydrostreptomycin (two atoms of hydrogen added to the original antibiotic). Two teams of doctors immediately started testing it. Last week the first public announcement of results was made in St. Paul, Minn. The news was hopeful...
...Hydrogen and its helium "ashes," while by far the most abundant, are not the only chemical elements which can be detected by sharp-eyed astronomers. The "main sequence" stars have, identically the same-composition as the sun: for every atom of any metal there are some six atoms of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, 500 atoms of helium, and 5,000 atoms of hydrogen (still to be burned). The same proportions of atoms exist in the near vacuum of interstellar space. Not only do the universe's largest bodies behave in much the same fashion as its smallest atoms...