Word: indium
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...start-up Global Solar, picks his way along his factory floor, tracing the convoluted path that his thin-film solar panels follow from birth to shipping truck. The raw materials the workers carry are ultra-thin sheets of flexible plastic, which are then coated with a series of chemicals--indium, gallium, diselenide--that allows the module to turn sunlight into electricity...
Bone to Blood. Current interest is focused on two isotopes of indium and gallium. At Ohio State University, Radiologists William W. Hunter Jr. and Xavier J. Riccobono worked with indium Ill, which was produced in the campus cyclotron. Using a special scanner, they found that the radioisotope concentrated heavily in bone in the first 24 hours after intravenous injection. As a result, X-ray photographs taken after the first day tended to reveal bone cancer. Even better, the radioactive molecules then joined proteins in the blood, concentrating in young, fast-growing tumors, thus revealing the sites of other cancers...
...front runner among today's diagnostic radioisotopes is gallium 67. Like indium, it can be virtually hand-crafted any time in any cyclotron. It, too, has a half-life of approximately three days-just right for selective concentration in a series of body tissues...
...when the metals are held at different temperatures. Since such a system has no moving parts, the thermocouple is theoretically an ideal way to generate electricity. Catch has been that most suitable materials cannot stand the high temperatures needed to generate thermoelectric power on a large scale. By combining indium (a soft, silvery metal used in dental alloys) with arsenic and phosphorus, the Westinghouse researchers developed a new chemical compound that performed thermoelectrically at temperatures between 850° F. and 1,500° F., achieved an estimated 10% efficiency. Compared to the 40% efficiency of the biggest electric generators...
Last week Philco Corp. announced that it has licked this production bottleneck by a delicate electrochemical method of "machining" germanium. Two hair-thin streams of a liquid indium salt are squirted at opposite sides of a tiny slab of germanium. The streams carry an electric current, and their electrified liquid slowly dissolves the germanium. When they have almost drilled through the slab, leaving only a few ten-thousandths of an inch, the current is quickly reversed. The drilling stops, and the reversed current deposits metallic indium on both sides of the thin germanium wafer. The result is a transistor with...