Word: plasticity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What is the opposite of adhesive? The word is abhesive, and it was coined by a scientist several years ago to describe something that refuses to let other material cling to it. The substance that inspired the word is a peculiar and promising product called Teflon, a slippery white plastic that feels something like a wet bar of soap.* Discovered in 1938 almost accidentally by Du Pont scientists who were working on fluorocarbon refrigerants, Teflon has other valuable properties: it will burn only when directly exposed to flame, is a superior electrical insulator and resists tears and impact...
...target room, he will usually work from an adjacent room or corridor, where he may be able to slip a bug into an electrical outlet or heating duct, which are often back-to-back. Otherwise, he may drill a small hole through the wall and poke a thin plastic tube into it, just short of the far surface, so as to siphon sound waves into a microphone next door...
...Lascaux, Sumerian tablets, and linear Egyptian murals. Prime examples are now on view at Manhattan's World House Galleries. To recapture timelessness in a modern idiom, Samant works spontaneously like an action painter, performing with his passionate pastel colors in such fast-drying media as spackle and plastic wood. Then he watches the painting for weeks. "If it's good," he shrugs, "it stands out. If it's bad, it fails...
Admiral and Kelvinator started producing refrigerators that are lined with plastic foam instead of the bulkier glass fiber, thus have bigger insides than conventional models. General Electric has brought out "self-cleaning" ovens that dissolve grime by melting it down at temperatures...
Across the rolling farmlands of central Ohio's Morrow County last week lumbered heavy trucks laden with pipe. In the county's once-slumbering towns -Mt. Gilead, Cardington and Edison, roughly 40 miles north of Columbus-dusty station wagons from several states competed for parking spaces. Husky, plastic-helmeted men searched for scarce furnished rooms. The night sky glowed orange, and the air was filled with an acrid stench. "That smell used to make me deathly sick," says one Morrow County resident, "but now it doesn't bother me at all." And why should...