Word: liquidize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...moon's flat maria (waterless "seas") are almost certainly covered with lava that poured out on the surface billions of years ago, said Astronomer Gerard Kuiper of Yerkes Observatory. In those days, Kuiper told the astronauts at Denver, the moon's interior was kept liquid by radioactivity, so any disturbance, such as a large meteor impact, was likely to cause an upwelling of lava. Kuiper thinks that smooth places on the maria will make firm landing spots for earth's spaceships...
...billion years or so of the moon's life, its exposed rock has been slowly turned into dust by bombardment of rays and particles from the sun and space. The dust, kept stirred up by the same agents that formed it, has flowed like a slow liquid into the moon's low places. So the maria, said Gold, are not filled with lava, but with dust, perhaps several miles deep. Gold suspects that the dust near the surface is still as fluffy as baby powder. He warned that an unwary spaceship that lands on a smooth lunar plain...
...matter-protons, neutrons, etc.-they generally annihilate themselves and their targets, both turning into weightless energy and neutrinos. About a fortnight ago an antiproton observed by Dr. Segrè and Dr. Wilson M. Powell behaved differently. It entered Dr. Segrè's bubble chamber, which is filled with liquid propane on the point of boiling, and made its normal, slightly curving trail of tiny bubbles (see cut). Suddenly the trail stopped, and a "star" of four diverging bubble trails appeared a few inches ahead...
...Like to Try." Thiokol got into missiles in the same way the rubber was invented-by accident. Its researchers had found a way to process solid Thiokol into a liquid, and during World War II the armed services used it as a sealant for aircraft-carrier decks, pipelines, and the wing tanks of planes (the average commercial plane today carries about 300 Ibs. of Thiokol sealants). Then in 1946 Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on a radically new solid rocket fuel, tried mixing an oxidizing agent with rubber. But it had trouble combining the oxidizer with solid rubber...
Thiokol has set its most ambitious expansion for next week: a merger with Reaction Motors Inc., a major maker of liquid-fuel rocket engines (TIME, May 27), owned 49% by Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp. and 23% by Laurance Rockefeller. The merger will give Thiokol all of Reaction's $16.5 million missile contracts, including those for the liquid rocket engines for North American's piloted X-15 plane, which is expected to climb to 100 miles, and may well be the first step to manned outer-space travel. With Reaction (1957 sales: $24 million) Thiokol expects to swell...