Word: paraffin
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...example, one of the jobs criminal investigators routinely perform is testing for gunpowder on suspects' hands. In the past, this was a surprisingly low-tech chore, involving melting a glob of paraffin in a pot and painting it onto the fingers and hands. The wax was then peeled off and treated with chemicals that react to gunpowder traces. If the chemicals turned up positive, you had your shooter--unless, of course, the chemicals were reacting with urine, bleach or fertilizer, which had a nasty habit of yielding identical results...
...children possess only a raw concrete shell of a house. The doorways have no doors; the window frames no glass. There is not a stick of furniture. The boys sleep on piled-up blankets, their few clothes dangling from nails. In the room that passes for a kitchen, two paraffin burners sit on the dirt floor alongside the month's food: four cabbages, a bag of oranges and one of potatoes, three sacks of flour, some yeast, two jars of oil and two cartons of milk. Next to a dirty stack of plastic pans lies the mealy meal and rice...
...donated bed in a cardboard shack in a rough Durban township that is now the compass of her world. Perhaps 10 ft. square, the little windowless room contains a bed, one sheet and blanket, a change of clothes and a tiny cooking ring, but she has no money for paraffin to heat the food that a home-care worker brings. She must fetch water and use a toilet down the hill. "Everything I have," she says, "is a gift." Now the school that owns the land under her hut wants to turn it into a playground and she worries about...
DIED. EDWARD CRAVEN WALKER, 82, unabashed nudist and inventor of the oozing 1960s groovy-soothing lava lamp; in Ringwood, England. After the lamp buyer at Harrod's found Walker's display of sculptural, sinuous paraffin-and-oil globs "disgusting," Walker took it elsewhere and hit big. "You can avoid going on drugs," he once said. "If you have a lava lamp, you won't need them...
...come to light in the mid-1930s, while the democracies still slept, Nazi Germany would have won a long lead toward building an atom bomb. In compensation, Fermi made the most important discovery of his life, that slowing neutrons by passing them through a light-element "moderator" such as paraffin increased their effectiveness, a finding that would allow releasing nuclear energy in a reactor...