Word: phosphorus
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...birds lived. And day after day investigators raided the headquarters and hideaways of the suspect religious cult. Day after day they emerged with ton after ton of chemicals--sodium cyanide, sodium fluoride, phosphorus trichloride, isopropyl alcohol, acetonitrile--some benign, but others deadly, and still others that if mixed together might create something deadlier still. Enough to kill 4.2 million people, guessed one newspaper; another topped it with an estimate of 10 million. Japanese television viewers watched, mesmerized, as the police stormed the redoubts of the sect, looking for evidence that might link the hoard to 10 horrible deaths that...
...sore eyes. There was "a horrible smell, like burning plastic," said retired farmer Norie Okamoto, who informed the police. The cultists got off with a warning, and the villagers were furious, especially when the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper disclosed that police samples of the soil around the compound contained organic phosphorus compounds that are potential residues of sarin, matching residues in Matsumoto--and now those found in the Tokyo subway...
...original rationale behind a screen saver was to prevent a phenomenon called burn-in which plagued older generations of computer monitors. When the same image was left on the screen for too long, the phosphorus layer on the surface of the screen would record that image and form a permanent "ghost" image. The "ghost" would then be visible at all times and interfere with the proper working of the monitor...
Screen savers helped avoid the forming of "ghost" images by varying the displayed image on the screen. While they were useful five or six years ago, they are no longer needed on today's computers. Modern monitors are coated with a layer of specially processed phosphorus that resists burning, even when hit by the same electron beam repeatedly for a long period of time...
Resolving a standoff between environmentalists and agribusiness, the Interior Department announced a tentative agreement with Florida and that state's vegetable farmers and sugar industry on a $465 million plan to restore the Everglades. Phosphorus pollution from fertilizer and the diversion of water by overdevelopment have contributed to the transformation of what was a 4 million-acre freshwater marsh into a murky 2 million-acre swamp...