Word: porousness
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Invented in Czechoslovakia eleven years ago, the object of the excitement is a sliver of porous plastic, slightly larger than a regular contact lens, that becomes soft and pliable when it touches the tears of weak-eyed wearers. Because of its agreeable flabbiness, the soft contact lens can be fitted in one sitting, as compared to four for hard contact lenses. Ophthalmologists generally agree that the soft variety is more comfortable and less likely to become scratched or to pop out unexpectedly than the hard kind. There are some 90 million near-and far-sighted Americans, but only 10 million...
...popping claims, some ophthalmologists have found disadvantages in soft lenses. They provide less visual acuity, and they cannot correct extreme astigmatism. Because the porous plastic they are made of drinks moisture like a sponge, soft lenses are difficult to keep sterile. Wearers of Bausch & Lomb Sofenses are advised to boil them for 15 minutes each night in salt water. Table salt is not recommended because of its iodine content, nor is tap water because of a variety of impurities. Each pair of Soflenses comes with a bottle of salt tablets and an electric sterilizer that resembles a baby-bottle warmer...
Ever since Du Pont scientists in the 1930s mixed coal tar, air and water to produce nylon, the wizards of Wilmington, Del., have been searching and researching for another equally profitable synthetic smash. By 1964, Du Pont chemists thought that they had found it: a porous polymer that looked and felt like leather, yet wore like armor plate. The company thereupon introduced Corfam, a weatherproof shoe material, predicting that by 1984 every fourth foot in the country would be encased in it. Du Pont stock rose to an all-time...
...Purdue University Chemist Robert Davis, who collaborated with Rousseau and confirmed his conclusions with other analytic techniques. Every person is surrounded by an invisible cloud of organic salts that have evaporated from the skin and been expelled from the lungs; these tiny pollutants may well be absorbed by the porous glass of laboratory beakers and flasks. Thus polywater-which is made by letting steam condense inside hair-thin glass tubes-could pick up impurities even in the hands of the most cautious chemist. In fact, investigators who have tried to make polywater in polyethylene plastic tubes have invariably failed, Davis...
...Cypress Swamp, drainage ditches for new housing may interrupt the already imperiled water flow into the Everglades. To the north, Walt Disney Productions is building a City of Tomorrow for 50,000 people that may cut off some of Orlando's water supply, since the site is atop porous soil that lets rainwater into Florida's vital aquifer. That underground layer of limestone stores much of the state's annual 57 inches of rainfall. Any significant damage to the aquifer could let salt water seep in from the sea and contaminate Florida's lush farm land...