Word: nitrogenous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plainly no 'toy. Jimmy, a quiet, confident boy, is in the top eight of his class at Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass., holds one of the school's major scholarships. When Army experts tore down Jimmy's rocket−planned to be fired by combining liquid nitrogen, gasoline and liquid oxygen−they were amazed at his skill. "It's surprisingly close to several motors already developed,"said John Womble, deputy chief of Redstone's Rocket Development Laboratory. "We found the fundamental approach clever and admirable...
...have a crippling effect on farm workers. Farmer's lung is a reaction to grain dust, producing chills, nausea and shortness of breath. It has forced a number of Wisconsin farmers to give up farming. Silo filler's disease is potentially more dangerous. Caused by exposure to nitrogen dioxide from fresh silage, the ailment has killed several farm hands in the Wisconsin-Minnesota area...
...experts are not sure what the spaceship's atmosphere should be made of. Pure oxygen might be all right if its pressure were low enough (at atmospheric pressure, it is poisonous), but nitrogen also may be necessary for human health. In any case, the pressure in the spaceship should not be too low. If a meteor punctured the skin, a good thick atmosphere of oxygen diluted with nitrogen or helium would not be lost as quickly as a thin one of oxygen alone...
When a human diver descends to great depths, the nitrogen in his lungs tends to dissolve in his blood. When he comes to the surface, it forms bubbles that clog the circulation. This might not happen to whales if their lungs were full of oily foam. Oil has an affinity for nitrogen; it can absorb six times as much as blood can. Fraser & Purves think that when a whale dives, the nitrogen in the air of its lungs is absorbed by oil droplets before it gets into the blood. So the whale makes a deep dive and surfaces without suffering...
...doing battle, a Minneapolis meeting of smog fighters from all over the U.S. suggested that smog irritation may not be caused by the obviously suspect fumes from exhaust pipes and smoke stacks. The theory: combustion in power plants and all types of engines throws hundreds of tons of nitrogen oxides into the air, along with hydrocarbon compounds. The oxides absorb energy from sunlight, which enables them to turn hydrocarbon compounds into what chemists call "free radicals," i.e., fragments of molecules free to form new chemical compounds. Possible result: rare chemicals in the air never suspected in smog...