Word: hydrogens
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...chooses as his narrator Timmy MacLaurin, a teen-ager who accompanies his father, Harold, first to Oak Ridge and then to Los Alamos. (The similarity of names can hardly be coincidental; though the author was an infant during World War II, his father later participated in development of the hydrogen bomb.) For the scientists in McMahon's New Mexico, the creation of the Bomb involves a minimum of moral anguish and soul searching. There is the war. There is the threat of a Nazi Abomb. There is intoxication with the new vistas of accomplishment to be born...
Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb and a champion of thermonuclear deterrent, complains that atomic experience has made Americans Bomb-shy, afraid to consider any rational use of nuclear weapons-worse yet, so fatalistic about nuclear warfare that they cannot bring themselves to build an adequate civilian defense system. It is a questionable complaint; U.S. deaths in a massive nuclear exchange, even in a well-sheltered nation, could approach 40 million-an unfathomable catastrophe for any society. But, in another sense-a sense Teller undoubtedly does not intend-the fatalistic terror about nuclear warfare may indeed...
Japan had plenty of company. In Australia last week, residents of Sydney were outraged by an enveloping stink of rotten eggs, which turned out to be a massive belch of hydrogen sulfide. Though officials blamed the offensive odor on an oil company plant, they were unable to prosecute for "lack of sufficient evidence." Like the Japanese, though, they did begin at last to strengthen antipollution laws and enforcement measures of the kind that have lately been applied to Sydney's famous beaches, which are now fouled by a daily outpouring of 200 million gallons of sewage...
...three researchers confirmed the fact that viral RNA material was indeed producing its own DNA. They labelled four chemical building blocks of DNA with a radioactive isotope of hydrogen called tritium. After mixing the building blocks with viral RNA, the "tracer" element appeared in what was chemically identified as DNA. Thus it was apparent that the RNA had assembled the blocks to form DNA in its own image...
Scientists once believed that the vast expanse between the stars was totally devoid of any kind of matter. But in the past few decades, they have been forced to change their minds. Besides confirming the presence of hydrogen and other earthly elements with optical and radio telescopes, astronomers have lately discovered a number of complex molecules in interstellar space: water, ammonia, formaldehyde and pairs of hydrogen and oxygen atoms that are ingredients of many other chemical combinations. Now the list has been further expanded. Researchers at the Bell Telephone Labs have detected large quantities of carbon monoxide in vast clouds...