Word: potassium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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White-Hot Metal. The most striking Middletown project is SNAP-50, a lightweight nuclear-power reactor designed to operate in space. Incorporating technical know-how gained on the airplane-engine project, this SNAP (for Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) contains liquid lithium and gaseous potassium, tricky fluids that would drive most engine designers to seek liquid solace. Molten lithium is frightening stuff; it corrodes almost anything, and bursts into flame on contact with oxygen. Gaseous potassium, while not quite so bad, is hot and explosive...
...Avco does the job by preheating the incoming air that eventually becomes plasma, adding extra oxygen to it, and burning oil with it in a chamber that looks like a rocket engine. This produces a flame with a temperature of 5,300° F. Spiked with a little powdered potassium carbonate to increase the ionization, the flaming stream of gas shoots between the poles of a magnet at 3,000 to 4,000 ft. per second, about three times the speed of sound at ordinary temperatures. The plasma cools down considerably as it flows, and a good part...
...anti-Red emigrés in Munich. The reason why the deaths had not attracted special attention-one was put down as a heart attack, the other as suicide-proved bizarre. His weapon, said Stashinsky, had been a single-barreled aluminum air gun that fired a pellet of liquid potassium cyanide through a fine mesh screen, releasing a poison spray. The poison caused death within 90 seconds after it was inhaled, leaving no mark on the victims...
Oldest Man. Atomic physics, says Brothwell in the current issue of Discovery magazine, can take a large share of the credit. When a manlike creature, Zinjanthropus, was discovered in East Africa three years ago, geologists from the University of California, using a potassium-argon isotope dating system, were able to show that flat-browed Zinjanthropus lived some 1,750,000 years back in prehistory, the oldest manlike animal yet found. By measuring the amount of potassium 40 and its decay product, argon 40, in a digger's find, scientists conceivably can fix an object...
...avoid radiation; milk and other vulnerable foods could be kept in freezers for a longer time before consumption, allowing short-lived radioactive materials to decay. Contaminated milk could also be diluted with uncontaminated milk, bringing radioactivity below the danger point. People could be protected from radioactive iodine by taking potassium iodine in their diet to block out or neutralize radioactivity. Farmers could use stored feed grain for their cattle during periods of high radioactivity. As for the vital water supply, most potable U.S. water sits in huge reservoirs for years before it is consumed, giving plenty of time for short...