Word: methyl
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...rocked blinded children in their arms and old men convulsed in their hospital beds. The pictures were all too real. More human frailty was on display than human progress. Odd how little it takes to pick up the facts involved in so sudden a catastrophe-to learn all about "methyl isocyanate," and how the pressure built up in a storage tank too rapidly for the "scrubber" to neutralize the gas that escaped into the atmosphere. Even a tragedy becomes a moment in technology, as if we feel compelled to advance knowledge at the same time we experience shock and grief...
...gaseous cloud released by several tons of methyl isocyanate blanketed the Indian community of 900,000 before anyone could escape. In the event of a similar Cambridge accident, however, a half kilogram of nerve gas emanating from ADL would have "some impact, but nowhere near the effect of the thing in India," says Edmund Crouch, a Harvard physicist who lent his risk-assessing skills to the local advisory group...
...lesser of two evils. In the past, farmers have used the controversial Ethylene Dibromide (EDB) as a pesticide. But scientists have determined that EDB causes cancer, and so food growing companies have been scurrying to find replacements for the dangerous chemical. The leading chemical candidates for substitutes, namely methyl bromide and aluminum phosphide, are believed to be as harmful...
Joyce Carol Outes: If the Princeton Creative Writing Department's own book-of-the-week-club wins, I'll be drowning my sorrow in methyl alcohol. James Wolcoff of Harper's (and The Village Voice and New York Magazine and Esquire and the New York Review of Books...) called her last book "oozesome." Give the medal to Wolcoff Still, her name always pops up this time of year 23-1 on logorrhea in the fifth...
...spread beyond the lakes. In some areas, humans may also be affected. In the Lac la Croix lake system of Ontario, where the Ojibway Indians fish for their livelihood, catches are showing high levels of mercury. Reason: the toxic metal, ordinarily concentrated in sediment, changes into an organic form, methyl mercury, in acid water and is then easily absorbed by the fish. While the threat to plants is not as well understood, acid rain can eat away at leaves, leach nutrients from the soil, interfere with photosynthesis, and affect the nitrogen-fixing capabilities of such plants as peas and soybeans...