Word: quartz
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Francisco River is South America's fifth longest;* for more than 1 ,000 miles it winds northward from the quartz-bearing uplands of Minas Gerais through the arid, scrub-covered backlands of Brazil's northeastern bulge. Then, suddenly, it hurls itself 275 feet down a jagged granite precipice in the spectacular Paulo Afonso Falls...
...Bathysphere ($12,000). Fifty-seven and a half inches in diameter, weighing 7,000 pounds, it is more stoutly built (of 1¾ in. steel) for the tremendous pressures at lower depths-2,000 pounds per square inch at 4,500 feet. It also has a new three-inch quartz window, slanted toward the bottom; the Bathysphere had side windows only. It carries a six-hour supply of oxygen in cylinders, fans to keep the air circulating, and trays of soda lime to absorb the carbon dioxide given off by breathing...
...needed Brazil as a strategic base and as a continuing source of essential minerals (manganese, quartz, mica). Today, Brazil is the cornerstone of the U.S. policy of hemispheric defense. Brazil, which benefited greatly from U.S. wartime expenditures, looks to the U.S. in peacetime for the aid that private and public capital can give to the building of the country. Brazilians want to tap U.S. technical skill for the development of the natural resources that are spread in abundance over the world's fourth largest nation. In area, only the U.S.S.R., China and Canada are larger than Brazil...
...Charles K. Kirby* of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine recently had an idea for making sure. He put Researcher Edward G. Thurston of Pennsylvania State College to work on a gadget. Result of their collaboration is a surgeon-alarm for gallstones: a tiny quartz crystal enclosed in silver at the end of a slender, hollow silver probe, and attached to an amplifier. The quartz acts like a phonograph pickup; when the probe touches a gallstone, it makes a ping or click-like the noise made when two small rocks are knocked together. The sound can be amplified enough...
When a miner breathes finely divided silica (quartz), the sharp microscopic particles, lodge in the little sacs at the ends of the air tubes in his lungs. The irritation forms scar tissue, whose stiffness keeps the sacs from collapsing, as they normally do, to expel air from the lungs. Breathing becomes harder & harder until the miner has to use all his strength merely to keep his blood oxygenated. Bacterial infections, including tuberculosis, often add to his misery...