Word: oxygenate
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These tiny plants, fertilized by nutrients in sewage and by the runoff of farm nitrates, explode into prodigious "blooms" that can cover entire lakes with a pea-green coat. When the algae die, they sink and decompose, depleting the lake's supply of oxygen and hastening its "death"-as has happened in Lake Erie...
Inhaled carbon monoxide, in smokers and nonsmokers alike, enters the bloodstream through the inner surface of the lungs, competing with oxygen in the process. The result is that the hemoglobin of the red blood cells carries less oxygen than normal, plus a load of the poisonous carboxyhemo-globin. Cigar smoke presents a hazard similar to that from cigarettes...
That chauvinism is displayed time and again, say exobiologists, by those who cannot conceive the possibility of life without water (which Sagan calls "liquid-water chauvinism"), without oxygen ("oxygen chauvinism") or in the presence of intense ultraviolet radiation ("ultraviolet chauvinism"). Yet life can indeed develop under conditions radically different from those on earth. It did, for example, evolve during untold eons on earth when there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. To those primitive forms of life, in fact, oxygen would have been a poisonous gas. Thus instead of requiring oxygen, Martian organisms, like some terrestrial bacteria, might thrive...
...scientists can spot the alien binary code. Giving their imaginations free rein, they can also recognize that the three groups of dots to the right of the star represent atomic diagrams: hydrogen (with one electron circling a central nucleus), carbon (six electrons and a nucleus) and oxygen (eight electrons and a nucleus). The atoms chosen suggest that life on the distant planet is based on a carbohydrate chemistry...
...family play, though it only contains the fragment of a family: a mother, her daughter and the mother's brother, who drops in from time to time. The mother, Weedy (Clarice Taylor), is both possessive and plaintive, one of those women who suck up so much of the oxygen in a room that no one else can breathe. Her thirtyish daughter Alberta (Frances Foster) is all nerves-lonely, desperate and starved for a man's caressing hands. Uncle Doc (Adolph Caesar) is an alcoholic numbers player...